


Small Spaces, Bad Blood (Year Two)

by biodigitaljazz



Series: Improvidence [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Also Other Underage Fooling Around, F/M, M/M, Meteorstuck, Not Totally Canon, Pale Cuddling, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Post-Scratch, Quadrant Confusion, Quadrant Vacillation, Those Crazy Kids, Underage Makeouts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-10-02
Packaged: 2017-12-18 05:08:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 38,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/875957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biodigitaljazz/pseuds/biodigitaljazz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Dave Strider.</p><p>You’re the baddest MC this side of the meteor and damn do you know it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Almost a year following Dark Corners, Sharp Angles. Thanks for sticking with me and enjoy!
> 
> * * *

Your name is Dave Strider.

You’re the baddest MC this side of the meteor and damn do you know it.

You’re also in a perpetual state of boredom lately and it’s been making you fucking itchy.

But you’re not letting the others see that ‘cause you’re kind of the rock around here. Your emotions are _yours_ son, and ain’t nobody gonna take that right away from you. You’ve had years to perfect and patent the Strider Stare and while it probably actually irritates the shit out of most people, it makes you feel a hell of a lot better. Not only do your sensitive eyes appreciate the gesture of always hiding behind sunglasses (even just normal lights really bug them sometimes, damn) but so does your pride. A lot can be said about a person through their eyes. Can’t see them, can’t really see an expression. Fine by you.

The past year has been the most uneventful. Lots of sitting around for something that nobody can actually explain yet. You were just as into this idea as everyone else was, obviously; the scratch was a necessity for survival of not just you, but also your friends. Actually, careening through the Fourth Wall was the fun part, Jade really stepped up to the plate there. Remind yourself never to get on HER bad side ever again.

This has been different though, just a whole lot of nothing much happening. There’s this crazy-tense Hurry Up And Wait mentality amongst a few of your fellow ‘passengers’ and that’s just _not_ your style. You’ve been trying to approach the whole thing pretty casually but now, two years in, you’re starting to feel pretty stir crazy. At least there was the excitement of looking forward to something new and settling yourself into a new living space in the first year – you got to figure out where you wanted to put your personal shit, you know, dig out a little hole for yourself to call home temporarily.

Lost its charm real fast, that.

The only really exciting thing to happen to you in the last year only happened for a couple of weeks at most. And now you don’t even have _that_ anymore, because you’re a fucking dumbass monogamist; probably just threw something pretty awesome into the toilet and flushed the sucker down because you just _don’t get_ the complicated mechanics of alien relationships. You’re entitled to your opinion, duh, but that opinion also just killed the highest possible chance you had for the next few years to get some.

He tried to explain it to you, too, and you know what you did? You remember? You brushed it aside and offered your own stance and forcibly removed yourself from the situation. You put your fucking fingers in your fucking stupid ears and went _la la la la_ and now look where you are.

Eerily alone, most of the time. Also not your style, not anymore.

Solitude used to be pretty okay, actually. You didn’t really mind it so much. Kind of came with the territory and how you were raised, too. Bro liked being alone, you’re pretty sure. But he also liked having you around, mostly so he could try to unexpectedly kick your ass. After awhile, you started to like that part, too.

You got used to being busy and doing important shit with your friends, though, and that sort of weaned you out of wanting to be alone really fucking fast. You’ve seen and done a lot of shit that probably a guy nearing sixteen _shouldn’t_ have seen or done. When you’re alone, especially at night, your brain likes to punk you with it.

He was such a fucking good distraction, too. Especially when he fought you, man, that shit was fucking amazing. You didn’t want to admit it to him at the time, but you’d _really_ needed that kind of action. He’s a good fighter, quick and lean and kind of flexible and okay there goes that mental tangent all over again.

The day he picked that fight with you was the most useful you’d felt in _months_ , maybe more. Sure, you can lay down a few excellent beats and rhymes when the mood hits you the right way in the right place, and sure, you know a thing or two about electronics, enough to patch up little breaks at least temporarily (shit, your methods even worked on _alien tech_ , how versatile would THAT look on a fucking resume) but at the end of the day you always wonder just how fucking _insignificant_ you might be once this whole thing is over. There’s always the deep-rooted paranoia that if you win the session, things’ll go back to the way they were and you’ll regress back to a thirteen year old body with a who-knows-how-fucking-old-by-that-point brain making minimum wage in a coffee shop somewhere because you spend all the years you should’ve been in high school traveling between dimensions at the speed of fucking light and helping some weird dude with a sash make a city out of empty cans for fun, _what the actual fuck_ is your life.

But he… he looked to you as more. To him, you were an opponent, not just some guy. He knew you had a sword, and he knew you were fucking deadly with it even though it was broken. He gave you something you hadn’t felt in so long, that day.

And that was the same day you chose to disregard it. Because you were stupid and the stupid one was you.

He doesn’t talk to you much anymore. 

At least he’s given you the space to think shit over, that much you’re grateful for. You aren’t sure if you’ve needed almost a year to hash out all your _feelies_ but he seems intent on avoiding you when he can. There’s been a slow, very gradual change in him that you’ve been keeping your eye on, especially in the last month or two – he sort of always seems like he’s constantly looking over his own shoulder, and the prolonged lack of real sleep is showing on him a lot worse than usual. 

You know he still sneaks off sometimes to hang with his friend the vent monster. The first time he did it, the smell was _totally_ gnarly, smelled a little bit like when you get a towel really wet and then bunch it up in a corner for a few days and let it get kind of rank. It was like that, but a little milder. Over time, the more often you saw him after he did it, the smell didn’t bother you as much. The one time you caught him (thanks to the Mayor, dude is so awesome), he didn’t smell at all. You still wonder what’s in there to make it that funky. You wonder, but you’re not sure if you want to actually find out.

Dead Body is always the first thing that comes to mind, and that shit just isn’t funny. 

You kinda doubt that if a dead body was involved, Karkat wouldn’t keep going back there. He seems as decidedly _not_ okay with dead bodies as you are.

You still talk _sometimes_ , it’s not like the two of you are cold-shouldering or anything. You don’t have any issues with the guy at all, but you feel a little sheepish sometimes (not that you’d admit it to anyone else, of course) when you think about how you handled everything. You should at _least_ have been a little more understanding about the position that he was in, shit, he probably _hated_ that he had some weird feelings for you and you made them worse by having ZERO fucking restraint and mashing your faces together so many times. It was really because the mashing was actually good, though. No, you hadn’t done much of anything in the past and yeah, absolutely you’re still a fucking virgin and what’s the big deal with that? Who has the time or opportunity when you’re trying to figure your damn Sburb session out? But you know a good damn kisser when you meet one, boatloads of experience or no, and despite his kind of awkward aggression, he was still good at it. Good enough to leave an impression on you, at least.

You’ve had too many months to reflect on how the whole situation makes you feel, and at first you were fine. You agreed not to mess around anymore without involving any of the weird alien quadrant stuff, stuff that you can’t really even begin to understand, but it’s been _stupid_ hard trying to keep your P’s and Q’s in check. You don’t like that he’s practically become a recluse because you don’t know if he’s doing it intentionally or being forced into it by some unseen clown-hand or what. You don’t even see him on his computer anymore, not like the piece of crap even really _works_ right or anything. Maybe the thing finally shit the bed for good.

You even miss the annoying gray capslock, who would’ve thought.

It’s been building up lately, this weird urge to reconcile and maybe try to get back into his good graces because you’re not a quadrant kind of guy but shit, you don’t DISLIKE him, either. Your current company has been all well and good – Terezi is fucking awesome and hilarious and obviously you like Rose a hell of a lot and Kanaya is pretty cool, too, but you’re surrounded by multi-species estrogen, drowning in it, and you need a bro sometimes. Sure, he can be a shit sometimes but his grouchiness is more funny than insulting to you. It’s only when he keeps important shit from everyone, which you called him out on because that’s how you roll, that you start to have a problem. You’re still convinced that you don’t have the full story. You’d been hoping on getting everything out of him gradually but. Well. You both fucked that up by making out every goddamn chance you got, congrats on that.

The day you finally decide to bite the damn bullet and approach him again is the day you catch him dozing off in the pantry.

You know enough about Karkat to know that he doesn’t sleep often, let alone sleep out in the open for no reason. It’s weird positioning, too, like he just sat down against a wall near the shelving units to rest and conked out there, legs outstretched in front of him, a can still in one of his hands. He seems so much calmer when he’s asleep; it’s kind of bizarre to look at. It’s like his face is usually a tightly-curled fist and now, while sleeping, everything is relaxed and at ease.

You approach him and tap one of his feet gently with the tip of your shoe.

He jolts awake immediately like you just popped a fucking balloon next to his ear or something.

His eyes wander desperately for a second, maybe two before they land on you and immediately that relaxed expression pinches right back up again. He glowers up at you and draws himself up to his feet, trying to look casual and NOT embarrassed that he was just caught snoozing in the middle of the canned goods.

“Still not sleeping great, huh?” you ask him, and you’re expecting some kind of fuck-off-and-die reaction in response but to your surprise, he shrugs a little and shifts to move around you. 

“I’ll be fine.”

That’s all he offers you before he walks away from you with his can. _I’ll be fine_ , that’s it. NOW you know for a fact that something deeper than just playing around in filth with a weirdo clown for a few hours at a time (just a guesstimate, there) over the course of the day is going on, here.

That’s when you decide to start really following and watching him.

You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into anymore.

 

\- - -

 

Keeping an eye on Karkat is not as strenuous as you initially thought it might be.

Mostly because he doesn’t fucking do much. 

You spend the next four days keeping tabs on his whereabouts and whenever he does his little vent dance, you start to time it. He does it every day save for one – maybe he needs a break or something, you’re not sure, but you get the hunch that it’s emotionally exhausting work trying to babysit someone who is pretty clearly unstable – and each day varies. _Completely_ different times. First day is about ten minutes. Second day is about an hour. Third day, break. Fourth day, _three hours_ jesus christ that was painful. You don’t even really know how you had the patience to sit there for three fucking hours waiting for Karkat’s scrawny ass to come back through the vent, but somehow you made it and as expected, THAT was when he looked the most ragged. Tired, worn down, maybe even a little disheveled. Ready to fall face-first into his recooniebed-whatever and sleep for like three fucking days straight.

But you know for a fact he wouldn’t let himself do that, anyway.

You decide to knock off the secret-agent-stalker routine for a bit just in case he notices and starts getting suspicious or creeped out, but only a day goes by before he VERY unexpectedly contacts you on the computer. It’s been awhile since you’ve seen that name on your screen. You’re really not even into the idea of scoping him out at the moment when he does it – but, of course, the moment his handle appears in a message to you, you’re all fucking ears. Or eyes, as it were.

 

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling turntechGodhead [TG] \--

CG:   OK@Y LI5TEN.  
CG:   BE7ORE YOU 5T@RT IN ON ME 7OR THI5 JU5T HOL|) THE 7UCK ON.  
CG:   MY KEY5 5TILL 4RENT WORKING 5O THI5 I5 THE ONLY W4Y I C4N TYPE EVEN 5OMEWH4T |)ECENTLY WITHOUT MI55ING 4NY GO|)|)4MN LETTER5.  
CG:   JU5T… |)ONT EVEN GO TO TH4T PL4CE.  
CG:   THI5 I5 4LRE34|)Y P4IN7UL ENOUGH 5O JU5T KEEP YOUR 7UCKING COMMENT5 TO YOUR5EL7 OK4Y.  
TG:   absolutely  
TG:   those ds must be a bitch to type out  
CG:   THEY 4RE.  
CG:   JU5T LI5TEN.  
CG:   I NEE|) 4NY TOOL TH4T YOU MIGHT BE 4BLE TO GET YOUR H4N|)5 ON 454P.  
CG:   THI5 HU5KTOP I5 PRETTY MUCH |)ONE 7OR 4N|) I NEE|) TO 5WITCH T4CTIC5. I7 I H4VE TO TYPE LIKE THI5 7OR THE RE5T O7 THI5 METEOR TRIP I 4M GOING TO 7UCKING KILL 5OMEBO|)Y.  
CG:   PROB4BLY MY5EL7 EVEN.  
TG:   wait you arent asking me to like build you a new computer or anything right because thats a pretty damn tall order  
CG:   NO 455HOLE I’M NOT 45KING YOU 7OR 4NYTHING EXCEPT TOOL5 I7 YOU C4N 7IN|) 4NY. THI5 I5 5OMETHING I’M GOING TO WORK ON BY MY5EL7.  
CG:   4N 4LTERN4TIVE COMMUNIC4TION |)EVICE O7 4 5ORT.  
CG:   |)ON’T WORRY 4BOUT H4VING TO WORK ON IT BEC4U5E I |)ON’T W4NT YOUR GRUBBY HUM4N 54U54GE 7INGER5 5CREWING EVERYTHING UP.  
TG:   careful now these sausagey delights definitely fixed your computer for you like three times  
TG:   almost three times  
TG:   a valiant attempt was made the third time  
CG:   YE4H I |)ON’T C4RE. POINT REM4IN5, 5OLO PROJECT, JU5T P455 ME 4NYTHING YOU C4N 7IN|) TH4T MIGHT HELP.  
CG:   HOW M4NY MORE TIME5 5HOUL|) I 45K OR |)I|) YOU GET 4LL TH4T THI5 TIME.  
TG:   chilly down im gathering stuff now  
TG:   bring it to you in ten  
CG:   5URE.  
CG:   ...TH4NK5.

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling turntechGodhead [TG] \--

But instead of dashing to fulfill his highness’s every curt and rude demand, you kind of just sit there for a second, staring at the screen like a big giant dumbass all fucking shocked and shit that he even bothered to reach out to you after such an extended period of radio silence. He _seemed_ like he was holding his own alright, kind of hard to tell through his gibberish of text, but that’s the impression you got. And he’s apparently keeping himself busy with who the fuck knows what and that’s kind of a comforting sign, too. 

Once you manage to pull yourself up out of your seat, you dig around and actually scrounge up a few things – another screwdriver, a needle-nose wrench, and only one alternate attachment to the screwdriver. You’re _sure_ there were others floating around, those things usually come with seven or eight different pointlessly uni-tasking tips and extensions, but hey, you do what you can. The _thing_ you’re calling home these days may be some sort of crazy laboratory or facility, but it’s not a goddamn hardware store.

His timing seems like a weird coincidence, but you can’t complain, really; you’re the one who’s been following the guy around behind his back like some weirdo, you sort of feel like you owe him at LEAST a small favour.

You also can’t deny that there is a part of you, a small part, a part that you aren’t really paying attention to right now that is sort of just annoyingly _aching_ to say more than three fucking words to him again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to make Karkat so damn broody - I promise, angst!kat is absolutely not the end game, here. Just situational, will pass. :)
> 
> * * *

You never knock because what’s the goddamn point. Usually when you’re visiting his room he knows you’re coming anyway, but every single time he gets pissed off at you for ‘barging in’. You get that the guy wants his privacy but Striders are like vampires, man. Can’t control what they do once you invite them in.

So, you waltz right the fuck in and he’s sitting at his desk like always, and the second he hears you he whirls around to glare daggers in your direction. You dismiss it. Used to it, that’s Karkat’s default expression and it could mean any one out of like, what, two hundred things?

He always has to make some kind of snide remark, too. “Do you _ever_ fucking knock or even at LEAST ask to enter rooms that don’t belong to you in any capacity?”

“Should I have brought an Avon package with me too?” you shoot back wryly and his eyebrows pinch together slightly.

“A what?”

Motherfucker, you kind of liked that joke, too. It sucks trying to make jokes with trolls. It’s always the best ones that fly the farthest over their heads, go figure.

“Avon. It’s- …nevermind.” You wave it away because you are not about to explain door-to-door fucking makeup sales with an alien who didn’t even know what the word ‘gay’ meant. You offer him your handful of useless shit. “I couldn’t find anything else man, sorry.”

His glare retracts a little and the lines in his face smooth out. He always looks younger when that happens, somehow. “Thanks,” he mumbles, taking the tools from you and placing them on his desk.

The desk that you move to and hoist yourself up to sit on.

He looks so put-upon, sometimes you swear you do this kind of shit around him just for his reactions alone. He probably doesn’t realize how expressive it is, but it’s hilarious.

“Wow rude, I don’t remember inviting you to stay and fucking chat.”

You lift an eyebrow, challenging him. You _know_ he tolerates your presence a lot more since the Snog Incident, and it’s been too damn long since the two of you actually straight up hung out that you’re willing to risk getting a fucking screwdriver lobbed at your head in favour of maybe verbally checking in on him. You still think of him as a friend despite everything; you’re allowed to be concerned.

He stares back at you for a minute (you have always liked the way he seems to seek out your eyes behind your glasses when he looks at you, like the fact that they’re there bugs the absolute shit out of him because he can’t make eye contact) before heaving a loud, annoyed sigh and turning back to his laptop. Husktop, whatever. He’s not actually doing anything on the computer, like he’s just sitting at it for the sake of sitting at it. The screen serves as a distraction from you, you wager, and that’s why he’s staring blankly at it.

“I’m not in the mood to entertain you today,” he mutters sullenly.

You shrug a little. “I’m not lookin’ to be entertained, man, I’m just hanging out.” 

The corners of his eyes tighten. People might like to think that you’re just a self-absorbed asshole who likes raps but you pride yourself in being perceptive where it counts. Right now, you’re on kind of high alert with Karkat because you suspect things are weird in his life, weird in ways that you can’t guess about or probably understand. And you give a damn about him, that much you definitely can’t deny. You can’t really imagine yourself going so far as to suck face on multiple occasions with someone you didn’t actually legitimately like.

A relatively uncomfortable silence stretches between you.

“You look really awful lately,” you tell him, and you didn’t really mean for your voice to be THAT gentle but there it is. That’s probably the tone he needs right now, anyway.

Of course, instead of taking it as caring about his well-being, he takes it as an insult. He always jumps to conclusions like that, drives you fucking bananas sometimes. “Wow, thanks so much, Dave!” The fake enthusiasm is so thick in his voice that you’re afraid he might choke on it or something. “That does a LOT for my mood, I could just shit sunshine and rainbows right now!”

He slams his computer shut (and you cringe because you know how sensitive the thing is, and an impact like that most likely jarred the screen’s cables loose again, good job Vantas) and rises out of his seat, swiping the tools you brought him off of the desk to walk them across the room. You aren’t sure where he managed to scrounge up a toolbox, but he’s got one sitting on the floor against the far wall. He lifts the lid of it open with the tip of his shoe and drops your tools into it with a loud clatter – except for the screwdriver tip. That, he keeps out to inspect for a second.

You seize the opportunity. “How’re things with your friend in the vents?”

His shoulders tense and he turns just enough to look at you over his shoulder through narrowed eyes. 

“Just a question, dude,” you press casually.

“Yeah, and out of every single fucking question you could possibly ever ask me, you had to choose THE most uncomfortable one.” He tosses the screwdriver end into the box and gives it a kick; it’s jarred enough for the lid to fall shut. “And the one that’s also none of _your_ goddamn business.”

His hackles are up, now. Maybe you should have been a little gentler about it? You may be perceptive, but nobody said you had tact. Oh well. Win some, lose some.

But the fact that he gets so defensive about it raises YOUR hackles, too, because his protectiveness over the subject could mean one of two things – either there is a level of intimacy to his relationship with the juggalo troll that you have been unaware of this entire time, or said juggalo troll is treating Karkat… well… not so good. That kind of really sucks to think about. You have seen him before, and you remember thinking _Holy hot damn that fucker is tall_ and then when you look at Karkat, who is easily a good half a foot if not more under you, your stomach feels weird. Yeah, between the two options you would really prefer it to be the former, but you’re not a particular fan of either, honestly. 

Those unfortunate thoughts in place, now as you’re looking at him with his arms crossed over his chest and his expression grouchily expectant but his eyes just so fucking drained and tired, you are overwhelmed with the urge to do something _totally_ uncalled for, like sweep him right the fuck up into a hug and remind him that you’re looking out for him in case shit gets really bad. How could you even do something like that, after everything that happened between the two of you and how uncommunicative it all was? You admittedly feel a lot for the guy but trying to ingest the idea of a strangely foreign polygamist quadrant set up with a dude, let alone an _alien dude_ , is pretty hard.

He always tries to make himself appear so much bigger and stronger and more thick-skinned than he really is, but you get the feeling that he is WAY fucking vulnerable. Which is fine, having emotions is a good thing, even YOU have them – you just have fucking glasses to hide behind, so it’s a lot easier for you to keep everything in check. He doesn’t have that physical blockade up, so he puts up a front instead. 

But you know better. You’ve felt the way he melted and folded into you several times when he let his defenses fall. He did it in a way that suggests that he was holding onto that front for such a long time and when you touched him, he used it as a chance to be weak for a little while, to fold his damn cards and lean into someone for a change. Strategic little fucker, he can always come back around and blame it on the kissing, too. Physical intimacy has a way of weakening people, even just temporarily, and now he has that excuse in his arsenal. Hell, he’s probably used it on himself so many times that he legit _believes_ it at this point.

You are strongly resisting the urge to fall back into that habit right now.

Not so good.

You consider telling him that you didn’t mean to make him feel weird, just that you’re a little worried about him being so regularly around someone unsettled enough to make a home in a fucking ventilation system. But you don’t. Instead, you shrug again and look away from him and say, “Sorry dude, won’t ask about that anymore.”

You called him a living landmine once, and that’s exactly what he still is. In fact, there seem to be more eggshells around him now than ever.

You touched a sensitive nerve and you have no fucking idea how to reverse it. 

Completely guarded now, he turns around again to idly and slowly nudge his toolbox back into its original spot with his foot. “I think you should probably go.”

Just because you were the one to make things awkward, you do so without another word.

 

\- - -

 

You have a hard time sleeping that night because you freak yourself out before you manage to drift off. You could swear that you hear things moving around behind the vent near your bed and you spend at LEAST a good hour laying still and watching the bars of the grate in the darkness, just barely visible to you. You watch a few times as your eyes play nasty tricks on you and morph what you’re looking at, and they get to the point where they unnerve you so much that you have to look away. 

Used to happen all the time when you were a kid. Your bro had to explain it to you like forty times over, usually only half-dressed and disheveled and practically falling back asleep while sitting at the end of your bed.

When you DO manage to sleep, you dream about crawling through a tight, claustrophobic space with no way of turning around or shuffling back because the way you came gets smaller as you move forward, and at the mouth of the tunnel's exit is Bro’s sword, poised and ready and waiting for you in the grip of an unfamiliarly clawed hand.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's feelings time. With Dave and Karkat.
> 
> * * *

“It’s a good thing you don’t particularly care for or confide in Oneirology, or you might have a lot of thinking to do today,” Rose quips as she pushes the drink she’s concocted for you across the table in your direction. It’s only juice, you know that, but you unfortunately have to resign yourself to the fact that it’s not AJ, nor will it be for the next couple of years. You’ve tried to repeat to yourself that juice is juice is juice, but shit just isn’t the same. 

Rose has been trying to perfect a synthetic appley sort of taste for you, but so far all she’s come up with has been such a _fake_ apple flavour that it actually offended you. Like really old apples dipped in chlorine. 

You reach out from where you’re kind of just a tired puddle on the tabletop, head resting down on one arm while the other slowly scoots the glass closer to you. You’re pretty fucking tired, you’re not gonna lie – that dream hadn’t been especially kind enough to let you get back to sleep. No, fuck no, you kept your fucking light on for the rest of the night with a goddamn pillow over the vent in your room, because _seriously fuck that noise so bad_. You haven’t been THAT freaked out since you were a little kid. You really need to never think about Bro directly after scary shit goes down and directly before you sleep like, ever again.

Nightmares suck enough. Nightmares about Bro are like… somebody very slowly pulling out your toenails, one by one. The difference in intensity between them is pretty staggering.

“Brain’s fuckin’ funny that way, isn’t it,” you reply flatly, curling the drink in closer to you but not making any moves to take a sip just yet. It feels so nice to just sit there. And not… move.

Rose rests her elbows on the table and watches you thoughtfully. You don’t like when she does that. Makes you _really feel_ the fact that she probably knows more about you than you even do. When her eyes narrow a little, you nearly cower back. “What?”

“Has something been going on?” she asks, her tone holding the perfect upward lilt of curiosity. 

“We’re stuck on a meteor,” you reply dryly, hoping to dissuade her from any more questions. “I’d probably say that not a whole fucking lot has been going on.”

The corners of her black lips curl up a little bit. God, yeah, she definitely knows something that you fucking don’t and she’s just being coy, asking _you_ what’s going on. 

“Look,” you exhale, pulling yourself out of your exaggerated slump into a normal sitting position like it’s going to make her take you more seriously (it won’t). “I know you know stuff, and I don’t usually take advantage of that, but in this case since I can’t fucking lie to you because you’ll _know_ – yeah, something is going on, no, I’m not giving gory details, and question, do I end up getting out of this Whatever It Is with my sanity?”

Rose squints at you.

“I think… you’ll be fine,” she replies vaguely, lifting one hand to prop her chin on the heel of it. “I shouldn’t give too much away, because this is the kind of situation that counts as a learning experience and it would be _highly_ beneficial to you if you got through it on your own.” She ignores the aggravated slump of your shoulders, doesn’t skip a beat. “But… I will tell you that if you play the hands you’re dealt correctly, carefully, and efficiently, you’ll be fine. You just need to start trusting your gut and seizing opportunities when they come to you.”

“That’s less psychic, more advice,” you point out skeptically.

She shrugs. “Take it as you will.”

Do you have any other choice, really? You aren’t even really sure exactly _which_ situation you’d been alluding to with your question, either – more than anything you’re thinking you meant the one with Karkat, which is a little weird. It’s a tough and stupid position to be in, trying to tell yourself that you don’t have feelings deeper than platonic friendship with a side of physical fascination for him while at the same time constantly thinking about how he’s doing, _what_ he’s doing, and who he’s doing it with.

Rose potentially knowing about the outcome between you and him really unnerves you. Part of you wants to know, the other part really doesn’t.

“So when are you gonna start alchemizing me some candy,” you ask to break the tension. She smiles and you can’t help but feel that you’ve dodged a bullet, somehow, even though you’re the one holding the damn gun.

 

-  -  -

 

“Where did you even find that thing?” you ask him as you bend to peer closer at legit the tiniest screwdriver you’ve ever seen in your life sitting on his desk.

“Terezi,” he answers coolly, leaning away from you a little because weh, precious baby’s personal bubble has been touched. “She uses them on her glasses whenever they break or get too loose.” He pauses, fiddling with the slightly bigger screwdriver in his hand, then grumbles, “Which is often, the fucking lunatic.”

He invited you to his room again because he needed an opinion on the whatever-it-is he’s trying to make. He told you up front that he didn’t actually want you to work on it with him, but that changed pretty quickly when he realized that he didn’t really know what the hell he was doing. Said that since there was no direct access to internet or spacenet, you were his next best choice as a sort of how-to.

Unfortunately _you_ aren’t exactly a fucking fountain of knowledge, either. You can only guess that he’s hoping some sort of system will work out with both of your brains put together, and you suppose it couldn’t hurt to try. Not like you have anything better to do, especially when Terezi isn’t around, speak of the she-devil. You like hanging out with her, but you can’t just hover around can town waiting for her ALL the time.

So. Here you are.

So far he’s decided that the best base for whatever he’s making (he wants your help and he _still_ won’t fucking tell you what it is) would be an old broken watch that he found on one of the many explorations he apparently went on around the meteor. He also found one half of an ANCIENT walkie talkie that doesn’t look like it’s been used in about four hundred years. You’re surprised by what he managed to find – a LOT of tools, a soldering iron (??), a hacksaw (???), two extra lamps so he can work at night if he has to… just a lot of shit that you _would_ consider calling worthless junk if it didn’t all turn out to be of some use to him. He may not really know his stuff just yet, but he’s taking precautions by having too much at his disposal just in case.

He sits at his desk, brow furrowed in concentration as he carefully unscrews the back panel of the walkie talkie. You look on, perched on his desktop just beside him. He didn’t complain this time. Probably figures you’re gonna do him a few pretty serious solids by giving him your technological advice during this little experiment, so the least he can do is not bitch and moan when you do one tiny stupid thing that bugs him.

He eases the back of the walkie off of it and peeks inside the opening. Immediately, this admittedly hilarious look of confusion and dread passes over his face. “…great, I understand just about absolute fuck-all of what I’m looking at right now.”

You scoot in a little to get a better look, and he angles it more toward you. Basic circuitry, really nothing THAT complicated, but it will probably take some crafty finagling because while you do know a few things, you’re no genius. You hum thoughtfully, gently taking the walkie out of his hands.

“What do you need to do with this?” you ask, still inspecting it. It doesn’t look TOTALLY burnt out but it’ll probably take some major tweeking to get it working the way he wants. If the crack in it is any indication.

“Essentially I want to take the board in that – “ He jabs a clawed finger at the unit in your hands. “ – and mix it with some Alternian technology to make it work again, but better.”

You glance down at him.

He stares back. Shrugs. 

“I don’t fucking know, you tell me, that’s why I dragged you here in the first place.”

“By Altwhatever tech, you mean your laptop?”

He hesitates. You get it – if you had to fuck up your slowly dying computer, the computer you’ve had forever and has become like a companion to you, in favour of an experiment that might not go the way you want, you’d be pretty wary, too. “I guess, yeah,” he finally says, and glances forlornly at the computer in question. What a torn fucking look on his face, too. You can practically hear the tragic soap opera music backdropping that look. Now you feel _compelled_ to try and help him out.

“Alright, no promises but we might be able to salvage this,” you tell him, holding the walkie up a little. He leans closer as you indicate to the length of the crack in the board with your finger; you have his full, undivided and most importantly _calm_ attention like he’s actually taking you seriously for a damn change, and you realize instantly that you really fucking like it.

“See this crack here?” He barely nods, but his eyes follow the path of your finger. “That needs to get fixed. Might know how to do it, too, I’m just gonna need to think on the best way, and have full access to all your tools. That cool with you?”

He settles back into his original position. “Okay.”

“Cool.” You hand the walkie back to him. “I can do it tomorrow. Like I said, gotta think on it a little.”

He shrugs again. “Okay, whatever. Not like we don’t have two more fucking years to figure things out or anything.”

You snort. “Sure ‘nough.”

You both go silent for a minute. It’s not exactly _tense_ , but it’s not the most comfortable thing in the world, either. Sliding back into regularly talking to one another and sharing the other’s presence has been a lot trickier than you expected, especially since maybe 70% of the time all you want to do is make out. It’d be a lot easier if you could switch your hormones off sometimes.

“How did you learn about all of this, anyway?” he pipes up, setting the walkie talkie aside and glancing back up at you.

You don’t look at him, though. You’re looking at the floor, just beyond one of your idly swinging legs. Not exactly a topic you LIKE to delve into often, especially after the shittastic night you had over it. Really it comes down to whether or not you feel like you can trust him with something personal – nothing gut-wrenchingly deep, of course, but pretty much anything that has something to do with your life before Sburb feels like it should be hold closer to the chest than most other things.

“…my brother,” you finally answer, just as Karkat is figuring out that you won’t answer him and looking away from you awkwardly. His head jerks right back up, all other movements temporarily halting.

“He was kind of good with computers, I remember that,” you go on, taking care to choose your words and phrasing carefully because the LAST thing you want to do is get overemotional. “He was good at a lot of stuff. Fighting mainly, though. We used to get into these seriously gnarly scuffles all the time. Used to beat my ass so bad, too, but it wasn’t like… abuse, you know? He always stopped before he _really_ hurt me. Sounds harsh but if he didn’t do that while I was growing up, I would have been totally wiped out the second I entered the fucking session. He _prepared_ me.”

He asked you a question about your technological knowledge. You vomited words all over him about your goddamn family. What the fuck, Strider.

There must be something really obvious in your voice, because you chance a glance at Karkat and just as your shielded eyes fall on him, he looks away from you again. He doesn’t seem uncomfortable, but he does seem like he’s sort of at a loss. 

The moment hangs heavily. Under the thrum of the meteor, there’s nothing but your joined breathing.

This here is the fucking domino effect – you don’t think you’re going to gab about something because it’s personal and none of ANYONE’S fucking business but you haven’t actually really allowed yourself to air out your feelings over the matter and now that you are, shit, you kind of almost don’t want to stop talking, even if you’re starting to feel like a fucking toolbag for even slipping up and starting in the first place. All of your emotions were totally up and straight and in control and one stupid fucking _awful_ look on Karkat’s face knocks over the first piece. Just fucking flicks it casually, and suddenly you feel like everything is crumbling.

“I don’t want sympathy or anything,” you go on quietly. “I don’t want you to look at me like that, shit. It’s just hard. I really fucking wish he’d just backed off. Obviously he couldn’t stay home, jesus christ, there were meteors EVERYWHERE and everything was on fucking fire, he had no choice but to come in with me. But if he didn't like, throw himself in front of me like a fucking douchebag and try to be the best and try to protect me, he wouldn't've--" 

You cut yourself off because your throat suddenly feels weird. You know the feeling, and you don't want it right now.

You take a long, deep, steadying breath and push yourself off of the desk.

"Yeah so I'm gonna go, sorry," you mumble and you're surprised by _how fucking close_ you come to punching him reflexively when he catches your wrist.

"Dave."

You quell the urge, shove it back down, and slowly turn to toward him.

His expression is one that you DO almost mistake for sympathy. But it's not. He's looking at you with _empathy_. He gets it. His eyes aren't telling you 'sorry', they're saying 'I understand'.

Something in your chest lurches painfully. You miss the shit out of Bro and you've really been feeling it since yesterday. He's been on your mind way too much and the nightmare kind of really fucked with you and the fact that Karkat, who is usually so blatantly petulant and angry and sharp, is looking at you _like that_ is really, really kind of what you needed right now.

Now you understand why you were both careful around each other up until now.

It's just too easy.

He pulls on your arm and you go to him without hesitation.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hitting ‘pause’ on the plot for a sec. Here, have an entire chapter full of blissful youthful fooling around. Also some awkward penis jokes.
> 
> * * *

In all your time and experience knowing and occasionally kissing Karkat, you realize just before you’re pulled back to him that you have never once actually had the pleasure of a bro-embrace. Neither of you are particularly _huggy_ creatures so it’s not exactly a surprising realization. Just an observation.

The moment your bodies connect, you also realize that waiting so long was a huge mistake.

Karkat is the best fucking hugger in the _entire world_. 

For all of his sass and his backtalk and his arsenal of vile and sometimes poisonous insults and the façade that he throws up in front of everyone, he is just really, really, _really_ good at hugging. It’s all in his movements and how he executes them. He tugs persistently but not forcefully, and once you’re within proper distance he rises from the chair he’s been sitting in and pulls you in the rest of the way with his arms around your waist. The gentility he shows you is pretty remarkable for someone typically so volatile, and when he presses himself flush to you with his head ducked against your chest, god fucking help you but you are a fucking _goner_. There is just something about it in this specific moment that feels so comforting that you are willing to temporarily abandon your _own_ aloof sort of façade and just melt right into it. You get the feeling that this gesture isn’t extended regularly or to just anyone, and shit, maybe it’s the emotions you’ve accidentally drummed up, but you’re going to take it and run with it. You may as well.

You return it, your own arms fitting around him just as perfectly, and the amount of squeeze he gives you loosens the vice that was in your chest and allows you to breathe a little easier. What did Jade used to call hugs? ‘Emotional Heimlichs’? A perfect description of what’s going on right now. You know you told yourself (and maybe he told himself, too) that this kind of closeness probably shouldn’t happen again just in case feelings were misconstrued, but there’s really nothing to misconstrue about this. You needed a goddamn hug, and he is providing you with an incredible one. 

He’s unexpectedly patient, too – he must feel how tightly wound up you are (you’re trying so hard not to _cling_ to him and you’re failing, you’re failing so fucking bad) because he just STAYS there, running a hand up and down your back, the strength of his hold on you unwavering, letting you just get it the fuck out of your system. And it’s working. It’s _really_ working.

You don’t know how long the two of you are just standing there hugging it out. Seems like a long time, but you can’t tell for sure. Finally, you feel okay enough to detangle, but when _you_ finally move to pull away, you’re stopped because his arms don’t reciprocate the notion.

Now what?

Your hands find a new resting place on his shoulder blades while you clear your throat awkwardly. It’s not that you want him to let go of you – you just feel like you went from the one needing comforting to the one suddenly dishing out the comfort. He’s _really_ holding onto you. The throat clearing gets your point across, though, and you feel the pressure in his arms fall away and loosen.

He doesn’t say anything. He pulls back enough to stare sullenly at your chest, his hands falling to your waist. He looks grouchy, but it’s the kind of grouchy that can only mask embarrassment. You’re obviously having some kind of mutual confusion over what’s going on and where all the feelings are resonating from but instead of trying to suss it out, whether verbally or in your own head, you find yourself watching his face.

He eventually glances up at you, mostly with just his eyes, and his expression is so guarded. Those eyes, _god_ they’re so fucking eerie but it never stopped you from secretly liking them, seem to be shifting restlessly along the surface of your glasses until he gets fed up, huffs softly with annoyance, and reaches up with both hands.

They hesitate when his fingers hit the rims. You give him no indication that you’re going to stop him. Because you’re not. You just sliced open your middle and spilled your guts all over his floor and he is _still_ willing to make this connection with you. That says something.

Taking your stillness as a green light, he slowly removes your glasses and reaches back to put them on the desk behind him. You have to squint against the light a little at first, but they adjust. He watches you the whole time, still with _that look_ on his face – slightly bothered, slightly confused, the creases in his brow never smoothing out. You HAVE to fucking wonder what he’s thinking about, to generate an expression like that. 

And you just… stand there, touching but not quite embracing, staring into each others’ eyes like you’re in one of his fucking cheesy lame-ass rom-coms but this isn’t cheesy or lame at all. This is startlingly powerful, whatever it is. This is what they TRY to pull off in those movies and generally fail miserably at. And Karkat is such a fan of them. He must really be living the goddamn dream right now.

You aren’t sure what to do now. You want to kiss him, _really fucking badly_ , but your hesitation stems mainly from the fact that behind those crazy-intense eyes he’s probably doing his quadrant calculations or something, and as _into this_ as you are, you’re still not into the idea of sharing someone. And the impasse is that you’re totally willing to carry on the way you were, but if he can’t do it without the quadrant thing getting in the way…

Your thought is cut short when he curls his fingers into the fabric along the sides of your ribcage. Your brain almost malfunctions completely when you feel the very slight, accidental scrape of his claws as he does it.

Uh.

What were you thinking about again?

You have no fucking idea.

You have no fucking idea because he’s making a move on you, on his own volition, and if that’s the way he wants to play it, you’re in no position as a dude with overactive teenage hormones and perfectly functional genitals to push him away. He knows your stance on everything. He knows that you are chill enough about his gender and his _species_ for fuck’s sake to give a rat’s ass about frivolities. The ball has really technically been in his court the entire time you’ve been keeping your respective distances and now, he’s finally kicking it back at you, and he’s kicking it fucking _hard_.

He pulls you in by the fabric he’s holding onto and you move with it willingly. It sort of feels like the contact between you this time is a little different, at first – a little calmer, a little slower and more careful – but it doesn’t take long for _that_ to be thrown out of the fucking window because it’s been almost a year since you indulged in one another. What starts out as practically borderline-sensual very swiftly changes tactics and turns to more familiar territory, with his mouth picking up urgency and one of his hands pushing into the hair at the back of your head and you moving forward until he’s got his ass up against the table again. It is so fucking frustrated how _into him_ you are, like kissing him as hard as you can and having him return the favour isn’t fucking enough, you sort of want to just crawl into the asshole suit he calls skin and _wear_ him. That should feel creepy, but it doesn’t. Mostly because you aren’t dwelling on it right now. Instead, you’re gathering him as close to you as possible while you wreak havoc on each others’ mouths and try _really_ hard to fucking behave yourself because you’re not entirely 100% convinced you’re ready to actually take it to the next level yet (despite the skin thing, whatever) and the idea both REALLY intimidates and REALLY excites you.

Maybe trolls are a little less reserved about shit like that because Karkat certainly seems more excited than intimidated by the prospect. He’s flush against you and squirming a bit and he’s started to make these really amazing hushed little growling noises in the back of his throat, jesus _absolute fucking christ_ how the hell are you supposed to try and keep your cool when he’s practically fucking taunting you?

Your mind is so blissfully blank save for him right now. You aren’t thinking about Sburb or the scratch or Bro most importantly or the meteor or the idea of a monster in your vents watching you sleep at night or the fact that you like Terezi or any of the quadrant bullshit – you have literally no capacity left for anything else in your head at the moment. No vacancy. No room at the motherfucking inn. All you have right now is him, and that’s enough. That’s _more_ than enough.

He suddenly yanks his lips away from yours and growls your name.

Your fucking kryptonite, right there. There’s no way he would have known that already. You inhale sharply and go for the throat, fucking _literally_ , pushing your mouth and tongue up against the spot right between his collarbones, sucking on the soft skin a little, and he does it again, louder this time, _rougher_ , and the fucker’s got your number now, he caught on quick and there’s no way he won’t take full advantage of it.

You are about to finally give in and let your fucking twitchy hands wander a little but he stops you by hissing and pushing on your shoulders. “ _Move_ ,” he snaps, pushing away from the table as much as he can with you still pretty much pushed against him. “Somewhere else, fucking table is biting into me.”

Breathing hard, fuzzy from the hormonal high, you immediately glance across the room at his bed thing. 

He shoots you down within a breath, “No, not there. I don’t know what sopor does to humans.”

You assume he means the slimy shit. Good point.

“Then where the fuck?” you breathe out because at this rate, you’re ready to knock all the shit off of the desk like they do in the movies.

He has an old, beat-up sofa in the room that you forgot about. You’ve seen it before but glazed over it, never really paid much attention. He cranes his (fucking tempting, _ugh_ ) neck around to look at it before more forcefully pushing you away. “There.”

Well. Hell. Works for you.

He is the one to practically drag you to it. He swipes the couple of books still sitting on it carelessly to the floor, grabs you by the shoulders, and fucking shoves you back onto the cushions so hard that you make this really stupid surprised noise totally by accident. You almost sort of WANT to ask him ‘okay what the fuck’ but you can’t because you find yourself completely fascinated by the way he’s crawling over you and situating himself so that he’s got one foot as leverage on the floor, and the other legs between yours.

And holy _shit_ , you are in such a vulnerable position. You’re almost actually uncomfortable for a few minutes while he places one hand on the back of the couch and the other on the armrest just behind your head. You saw this going in a MUCH different direction, like with _you_ calling the fucking shots, but you’re dealing with Karkat Vantas, and Karkat Vantas is a bossy, stubborn, self-proclaimedly controlling little snot and it is what it is. Unless you want to stop entirely (which you absolutely don’t) you sort of just need to lay back and see where he’s going with this.

Thankfully your wussy trepidation was totally useless because when he leans down and starts pushing against you in a deep, deliciously open-mouthed kiss, you respond instantly, bringing your hands up into _his_ hair for a change and curling your index fingers and thumbs around the small nubs of bone nestled in it.

You used to imagine that fooling around with an alien species would be incredibly fucking weird, too weird for you to keep any semblance of a boner at all, but instead, it’s… actually pretty cool. Interesting, even. You don’t mind the horns and you’re curious about the soft sort of rumbling noise coming from the back of his throat. …no, not the back of his throat, somewhere deeper, somewhere more in his chest probably. Kind of like purring? But not at all like purring at the same time, it’s a lot more guttural. You’d ask him about it but that’s sort of hard to do when he’s practically sucking on your tongue.

Things are getting really carried away, and the big indicator is when he lowers himself a little more and his thigh is suddenly up against you and yours is up against him and there’s DEFINITELY interest on his end, you can feel that _really_ clearly. It was sort of to be expected; how in the fucking world would _anyone_ regardless of species avoid that happening in a situation like this?

What you aren’t expecting, though, is the movement.

You feel it and immediately pull away from him, scooting reflexively further back toward the armrest. “W-“ you breathe, because wow, what the hell was that.

“Wh- the f-…”

He’s watching you, his eyes practically glowing and his face tinged with an aroused flush. “What?” he asks. Then again when you don’t answer quick enough, more incredulously, “ _What_?”

He sounds kind of pissed. You can’t blame him, you’re even pissed at _yourself_ for putting on the brakes but… seriously that…

“Dude,” you finally manage. “dude something moved in your pants.”

He stares. Like he’s a fucking old, slow, outdated computer trying to download something huge.

You try again. “Like, like _moved_ dude, what the fuck.”

He takes a long, deep breath in through his nose, lets it out in a slow stream through his mouth.

“That would be my bulge, fuckwit.”

“Oh,” you reply wisely. “So... what, that’s like your wang, right?”

Irritation clouds every inch of his face. “Yes. Dave. It _is_ actually my _wang_ , as you so fucking eloquently put it.”

You crack a small grin, because you just got Karkat to say ‘wang’. So THAT’S what he’s referring to whenever he fucking calls you a ‘bulgesniffer’? He's basically been telling you that you sniff dicks. What an asshole. 

…it’s pretty easy to see that the moment is ruined. Your boner is going down and Karkat has shifted totally away from you. He sits back on his haunches, vigorously scrubs his face with his hands and does the breath thing one more time. 

You get the hint. “I should probably leave, huh? That was… kind of a lot anyway, wasn’t it?”

“Mmmhm,” he hums in agreement and he sounds _really_ annoyed. He moves off of your legs and off of the couch entirely, and he kind of just stands there with his hands in his pockets, staring at the wall because you’ve never gone this far physically with him before and now that it’s come to an abrupt and admittedly kind of disappointing end, he seriously doesn’t know what the fuck to do with himself.

“…yeah, I'll be back tomorrow for the thing,” you offer again, rising to your own feet and breezing past him, grabbing your sunglasses off of the desk as you approach it.

You turn at the door to look back at him. He’s still glowering at you. His clothes are rumpled and his hair is messy and he LOOKS like someone’s had their hands all over him, and _damn_ do you appreciate the view more than you should. 

“Hey,” you say, and he barely lifts an eyebrow in response.

You gesture to the spot between your own collarbones, where your mouth was on him only minutes ago. “Got a little mark. Right there.” You grin, wide. “Sorry about that.”

You hear something thunk against the door when you shut it behind you.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woefully short compared to others, I apologize. Stuff picks up again soon. I also promise that Karkat's behaviour is relevant.
> 
> * * *

You wake up feeling strange. Giddy, but confused. Proud, but also a little guilty. Really fucking strange. You’re telling yourself repeatedly not to dwell on what happened with Karkat because it could hold some seriously unhealthy consequences for you. You can reflect on it, sure, nothing wrong there. You can accept that you _enjoyed_ it, that’s also cool. But like hell you’re going to daydream about it or something. Or, worse yet, jack off over it. That’s the dangerous threshold – that means you’re dwelling on an _intimate_ level and no, fuck no.

Though it is inappropriately tempting.

You clean up, get dressed, swing by the pantry for something to shove into your mouth really quick, and head to Karkat’s room. Halfway there, the hesitation starts to kick in but you ignore it as hard as you can. You’re going to be sitting in that room for awhile, working at the desk that you pushed him back against and facing the couch that he practically engulfed you on. And he will undoubtedly be there and hovering the entire time you’re working because this IS his experiment with whatever the fuck and it’s not in his nature to trust something of any level of importance to him in the hands of someone else without supervision. You figured out awhile ago that he was kind of a control freak.

Mostly you just gotta go into this expecting it to maybe be a little awkward at first (who knows what the fuck _he’ll_ be acting like) but accepting it all as a thing that happened. You can’t exactly take it back, right?

You still refuse to knock.

You steel yourself a few paces away from the door and barge on through it like you usually do (sometimes you're a little afraid you're going to intrude on something REALLY awkward and embarrassing by accident but fortunately Karkat doesn't seem like the _scandalous_ or _deviant_ type) - sure enough, he's already at his desk and trying to tinker with stuff, the impatient doof. 

"Hey, man with the magic hands coming through," you announce as you reach his chair and give the back of it a light slap. "Up."

See? You can totally do this casual thing. No big deal.

"About time," he grumbles back, setting the walkie talkie aside and standing up to let you sit down. You catch a glimpse of his face as he's shifting past you. He usually looks generally terrible with the frown lines that are indented into his face and the dark bags beneath his eyes, but he looks worse today. It's almost surprising how quickly everything about him has changed, just barely overnight, but you can't really comment on it just now. He doesn't seem awkward about what happened between you but just in case it's just a really, really good front, you hold your damn tongue because you don't want to make things any more tense.

Still makes you crazy-curious, though. 

Once you're seated and settled, you pick the walkie back up and let your eyes scan the table. For such a monstrous grump, Karkat seems to possess _amazingly_ patient organization; he's laid literally _everything_ he has out for you, all grouped according to size. Use would have been a more proficient way to sort them all, but you give him credit anyway. Either he's trying to impress you or he wants to make sure you find what you need fucking _instantly_ because he wants this damn thing to move forward.

What's sad is you don't know which you believe more, after last night.

Wearing shades all the time has so many advantages; while you start removing the screws that hold the plastic body of it together, you keep a light eye on him as he crosses the room to where he keeps his piles of books (guy has a couch and no bookshelf, this place sure was fucking furnished strangely). He bends a little to peer at them, looking across the spines for a good title, you’re assuming, and you can tell that if he plans on reading his way through this morning, it’s likely that it’s going to be a pretty quiet encounter.

Or so he thinks.

“So since I’m up to my elbows in this project now,” you speak up as you carefully disassemble the body of the walkie. Sweet, sweet innards. “you wanna maybe tell me what you’re trying to accomplish, here?”

He continues to browse his books. He isn’t even outwardly bristling at you, by way of some sort of freakish miracle. “I already told you,” he replies, lowering to a crouch to see some of the bottom titles. “I’m trying to make an alternate communication device to replace my husktop.” 

He’s sort of talking to you like you’re fucking five years old and hilariously stupid, though, which is almost just as bad as being approached with the standard Vantas Moodiness. 

“And you’re using a walkie talkie as a base for it?” If you sound skeptical it’s because you fucking are. 

He eases one of the lower books out of the pile he’s been scouting. “Yes. It seems like the closest method to what I’m trying to accomplish.”

You raise an eyebrow at the back of his head as you hold the bare, exposed, beautiful sweet nectar of technology in your hands. “You know what a walkie does, right?”

He turns to glare at you. “Yeah, asshole, I know what they do.”

“So how’re you gonna use this without a partner unit?”

“I have one,” he tells you as he approaches the table again, scooting out the chair directly across from you. “I opened it and took a look at it last night after you left.” There is a very small pause there, the first mentioning of the night before, and you feel like he just got elbowed with the same strange, unwelcome reminder that he did because you meet his eyes from behind your glasses for that moment before he barrels on through it like it didn’t happen. “Nothing looks cracked or broken, so you won’t need to fix it.”

You almost feel the corner of your mouth threatening to twitch up a little. “But you still need someone to configure it with your alien stuff, don’t you?”

He shrugs with his hands splayed slightly like it’s no big deal. “You agreed to helping me. You _offered_ , even.”

You got a full-fledged smirk now. “Yeah dude, I agreed to working on one thing. Not two.”

He rolls his eyes and jesus christ somehow he makes it look kind of cute. “For fuck’s sake Dave—“

You cut him off before he has the chance to lapse into a full-fledged rant. “I’m just playing around, dude, I’ll do it, whatever. Got nothing else to do, anyway.”

When Karkat visibly deflates it’s actually pretty funny because he gets all geared up to start a massive fight (you sometimes wonder if he actually gets a sense of self-fulfillment from fighting because he picks so goddamn many of them) and when it doesn’t happen, his shoulders slump and his face gets heavy and he actually looks really disappointed. “Fine,” he mutters, averting his eyes and finally dropping into his seat.

He's unusually docile today. And that, seeing as you'll be working the whole time, is totally okay with you.

The next couple of hours go by pretty quickly. You are really rusty when it comes to this kind of shit and you start off slow, getting back into understanding the mechanics of basic circuitry and trying to remember what Bro used to do when he fixed all of your broken electronics. He didn’t believe in hauling a computer or various pieces of (sometimes pretty fucking cumbersome) DJ and audio equipment to a “specialist” when he had an idea of how all of it was put together and could figure it out for himself. You don’t know where he learned it from but it usually did the trick. He tried to show you on multiple occasions and unfortunately you were a dumbass kid and spaced out on a good chunk of it, no matter how many times he caught you and whapped the back of your head and told you, ‘Pay attention, little man, might need to know this someday’. Right now it’s like piecing together a puzzle that your brain can only recognize half of the shapes for. 

Karkat alternates pretty frequently between watching you and reading the book he’d chosen – the title of which you aren’t familiar with, seeing as it’s four hundred fucking words long. You spend _your_ time getting weirdly introspective about Bro again, and this time you’re determined not to let it spew out as word vom all over Karkat’s face because first off, your stupid vulnerability got you into this physical mess with him in the first place and second, Bro was _your_ brother, _your_ pillar, and nobody really needs to know anything too deep about him. Not that he was a particular deep dude, though – actually, he was an incredibly open book, and kind of a dull one at that. He liked staying home and making his puppets and sometimes he indulged in video games with you and he taught you how to use a turntable for the first time and he showed you how to defend yourself. He was a peculiar man, peculiar and lonely, but even you can’t deny that he did a hell of a job raising you.

You get both walkies disassembled completely before you decide to take a small break, gingerly setting everything aside and stretching your arms above your head, popping your spine a little. Karkat catches the movement and glances up; he’s most of the way through his book by now, but you know for a fact that he was watching you when something complicated was going on because you were watching him off and on, too. 

You’re both being passive and stupid about this whole thing and it’s working for you just fine. As far as _you’re_ concerned, if it happens again, it happens again. Not much you can really do about it. For a little while, there, you weren’t too sure how he was taking everything, especially after how far you managed to take it last night (you hate yourself for your curiosity but you kind of _really_ want to know why what you were expecting to be a hard-on shifted around in his pants like a goddamn ferret, that actually did scare the shit out of you for a second), but there’s a moment between you when you get back to work and your stomach abruptly lets loose this _thunderous_ fucking growl that pretty literally echoes off of the walls because the rest of the room is so quiet. You look at him and he glances up at you almost like he’s startled, and you can’t help but smile because your loud, hungry organs just spooked him and you think it’s funny, and instead of flipping you off or sneering at you he just smirks back, showing a little bit of fang on one side, before dipping his head back down to continue reading.

The day progresses mostly in surprisingly comfortable silence.

 

\- - -

 

Once you're done and you've made some use of the soldering iron and more of the circuit boards are disassembled, you pick yourself out of your seat, stretch again, and mutter something about getting something to eat. You're more tired than you are hungry, but more than anything you feel really accomplished for what you managed to get done with so much rust on your brain.

Your announcement seems to snap Karkat out of some weirdly inattentive haze and he blinks up at you, a little surprised, like he forgot what fucking time it was and how long you've both been sitting there, despite him having even moved on to a second book. He agrees amicably, though, with a murmured, "Alright." and then an even quieter, more begrudging, "Thanks for helping."

You want to stray away from temptation so you make a point to leave without jumping him again, but when you turn and start moving toward the door, you glance curiously at his bed-thing sitting in the corner.

You can't help but notice before you leave that the gooey slime inside seems a lot lower than the last time you really looked.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> life is mcnutty! sorry for the delay - shit is starting to hit various different fans now.
> 
> thanks for all of the comments guys, especially the ones trying to guess what's coming up; those are my favourites. y'all are awesome, as always. :D
> 
> * * *

You try not to think about it for awhile but the thought keeps creeping persistently back to you like a bad omen and although you have no clue what that slimy shit actually is or does, you get the feeling that maybe it’s something important if trolls _sleep_ in it. You’re not sure what exactly caused you to notice the level of it in Karkat’s little sleep-pod in the first place, or what even possessed you to look at it again during your last visit, but there was _definitely_ a drop and now you kinda want to know why. The troll _did_ seem a bit off to you, like he was WAY too calm to be considered normal, and the more you think about it the more it really fucking bugs you. You enjoy Karkat more when he’s shitty and huffy and completely impossible to deal with. Docile, non-committal Karkat gives you the heebies, but only in retrospect. At the time, it was kind of nice being able to sit and enjoy his company without getting another asshole reamed into you for no reason.

It’s been a handful of days since he last needed your help on his little science experiment.

You _have_ tried to get in contact with him. The husktop was pretty much a no-go but you checked your messaging system anyway and, as expected, he wasn’t connected. You tried showing up at his room but it’s been locked up with no answer when you tried _actually_ fucking knocking for a change. You thought about asking Rose and very nearly did; fortunately your common sense caught up with you before you got the chance and reminded you that Rose knowing meant Kanaya would know. Kanaya knowing meant a possible panic on her end which would in turn make _Rose_ uncomfortable and yyyyeah that’s a lot of frantic estrogen that you don’t want to deal with right now.

Your last checkpoint is Terezi. You don’t know why you didn’t think of her to begin with.

It’s been a little while since you last spoke with her in-depth, too, but that’s a more comfortable distance than the one you’re presently experiencing with Karkat. Terezi is crazy-independent sometimes, and she doesn’t have the same irritating tendency to fall into a completely unprecedented funk and sulk off on her own the way Karkat does. If she needs someone, she seeks them out, period. And you like that about her.

You like a lot about her, actually. She’s a cool chick.

You know where to find her; she still likes hanging around Can Town because she enjoys the Mayor’s company – hell, who doesn’t? – and shit, that place is _your jam_. Real nice memories in good ol’ Can Town. That’s even where you guys kissed for the first time.

Oh, right, yeah, that happened. It was a one-shot, something neither of you were particularly expecting but you weren’t exactly _surprised_ when it happened, either. It happened back before you inexplicably fooled around with Karkat, and it hasn’t been something you’ve brought up since because you’re both being fucking wieners about it for who knows what reason. It’s not awkward or anything; you kinda get that the two of you leapt into it without expectations and came out of it without judgments.

Like you said. Terezi is a cool chick.

Weird as all living fuck, but cool nonetheless.

“Ooohhh,” she croons with her back facing you as you round the corner leading from the pantry. You smirk, lean against said corner, and watch as her head turns slowly, tilts itself over her shoulder so that she is almost facing you dead-on. “I smell something _too cool_ coming my way.”

You snort, crossing your arms over your chest. “Damn, and here I was trying to be stealthy and shit.”

She lifts a hand, tapping the side of her nose with the index finger of her free hand – the other one is holding three pieces of coloured chalk Wolverine-style between her knuckles. Her grin is wide, as always, and displays her eight _thousand_ fucking crazily sharp teeth openly. “Can’t use stealth on scent, coolkid.” The same hand comes down, gives the ground beside her a solid slap. “Get over here and help me with something, would you? I’m kinda stumped.”

You notice as you wordlessly concede and approach her that she had managed to seat herself perfectly between everything that has been sketched on the floor so far – how the hell does she do it? Even the space she’s patting for you is clear. It’s occurring to you that she’s probably like, this weirdly advanced stage of blind that is actually totally fucking fine and doesn’t _have_ to see. She seems happy enough the way she is; you wish more people (yourself included) could relate.

You nudge her hand with your foot and she withdraws it so you can sit down, careful not to accidentally sit on your damn cape again. 

She holds up the hand gripping the chalk. Red (pink-ish, technically), purple, and blue. Naturally, you pluck the redpink out from between her fingers. She opts for the purple.

“A’right.” You glance around you. “What do you need help with?”

She gestures out in front of her, where there is a particularly blank patch of ground. There are a few streaks of moisture still drying from when you’re assuming she was double-checking to make sure it was blank. _Ew_. “This whole space here,” she explains. “is totally empty. The Mayor has deemed it our duty to make a new building here. But I don’t know what to add!”

Hm. You try to recall a mental checklist of the buildings you already have, which isn’t a lot. A Mayor’s office (which is too small for the actual Mayor, but he doesn’t seem to mind one bit), a town hall, a spaceport for interplanetary travel – this was Terezi’s idea; total stroke of genius – and a few smaller buildings that you have just taken to calling ‘apartments’ even though Terezi insists that they are ‘individually functioning respiteblocks that happen to be built into the same construct’ which… sounds like a fancy way to say ‘apartments’ to you.

“What about a library?” you offer.

Her grin dulls down and she tilts her head at you curiously. “What’s a lie-berry?”

“It’s a big building full of books that humans can go to, to read or study without having to _buy_ the books.”

“So it’s just a big room where people read all day?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

Her nose wrinkles cutely. “That sounds boring!”

Reading all day sounds boring, says the blind girl.

“Nah, it isn’t.” Okay, maybe libraries were a _little_ boring, but you liked the kid’s section when you were really young and when they started letting people take out _videos_ it was like your entire world collapsed and imploded. Plus, you almost feel like you’d be shaming Rose straight into her undead god-tier grave if Can Town didn’t have a library. “There were lots of picture books in my old library, you’d probably would’ve loved that.”

She pauses before her grin starts to float back. “Picture books, huuuh?”

You grin back, despite yourself. “Yep. We’ll make the pages in _our_ library waterproof for you, how’s that sound?”

“Done!” she crows, throwing both of her hands gleefully into the air. “Okay, let’s do it, let’s make a lie-berry!”

You need more cans before you can _officially_ build the library up, but you let Terezi re-route some of the nearby roads in preparation for the new addition, and you map out a basic foundation. You work slowly, waiting until the right amount of busy silence has settled between you to spring the reason you came here to begin with. 

“So hey, you seen Karkat around these days?”

“Mm, not in the past few days,” she replies casually as she sketches out her new windy roads. They overlap pre-existing ones a little, but that’s fine. You’ll just pretend that they’re elevated freeways or something. “I know he’s been busy with something but he didn’t really tell me what. We don’t…” She pauses. Her movements do, too. “We don’t talk so much lately.” She lifts her head, eyebrows coming together _just_ slightly. “Why? Do you think something’s wrong?”

“Nah, not necessarily,” you lie and hope to hell that she can’t smell the fib on you. “I just haven’t seen him either. Been wonderin’ what he’s up to.”

She lowers her head again. Her drawing resumes, but it’s much slower than before. “Oh.”

Well, that was a whole lot of no information whatsoever. But at least you _have_ confirmed that something is up between the two of them. 

The rest of your cooperative sketching is done in silence. In the time it takes you to finish your foundation map and help Terezi connect her roads, you’ve figured out the one last place he might be that you haven’t checked yet. You’re suddenly filled with the intense urge to go straight there, but you have to play it cool, keep Terezi sort of in the dark because you don’t want to get her all riled up.

“Looks awesome,” you say as you rise to your feet and casually, slowly stretch. “Wanna get some cans together in the next few days and build this sucker?”

“Yeah,” Terezi agrees, her head angled up to get a better sense of where you are. “You’re leaving for now?”

You have to forcibly ignore the slight tinge of disappointment in her voice.

“Gonna go catch some Z’s. Didn’t sleep well last night.”

She chews on the inside of her cheek for a minute (how she does that without slicing her face clean open on those teeth of hers, you will never know) before nodding. “Okay. Sleep well, coolkid.”

You make it to the corner before she calls out again. “Hey, Dave?”

“Yeah?” You turn to look back at her.

She offers you a small, almost… shy? smile. “Maybe wanna meet up again later tonight, just the two of us? To sketch some more or…” She shrugs. The smile grows, showing teeth, and it should be a bit unsettling but coming from her it’s actually pretty fucking cute. “…I dunno, talk or… whatever?”

Damnit.

“Maybe tomorrow?” you suggest, because who knows when the fuck you’re going to find Karkat. And who knows what the fuck condition he’ll be in.

She nods her agreement as her smile slips. Only a little, but you notice it.

 

\- - -

 

You know that you _really_ shouldn't be treading these particular waters but you don't really see much of a choice. Well, actually, no that's not entirely true; you DO have a choice, but the choice is a pretty fucking stupid one. Either you can suck up the nervousness and take yourself down this route or you can hang around uselessly and wait for Karkat to randomly reappear and establish contact with you. 

You know how he gets when he's in one of his moods. He'd hermit himself away for weeks and die of starvation before asking someone for help or making the first move, the stubborn piece of shit. 

You're walking a fine line between looking after a begrudging friend and babysitting a fucking mantrollchild, but either way, you know what you have to do and either way, it means figuring shit out before it gets too deep for you to help manage.

The corridors leading into the bowels of the lab are way darker than you remember them being. Shit, there's no logical explanation as to why they would only feel darker _right at this moment_ given the circumstances. You aren't scared, hell naw, but you're definitely not cool and collected anymore. You got this anxious feeling in the pit of your stomach that's keeping your ears sharp and your wits totally about you, which is a good thing but at the same time you really fucking _hate_ it because you can't relax, not even for a second.

If your memory serves you correctly, you feel like you might almost be there, maybe just another turn or two down the dark halls and there it'll be, the dead-end with the gigantic fucking rusty grating. You aren't sure what you're expecting - a part of you is really hoping that it's closed up because it'd likely mean that Karkat isn't there. The other part hopes it's open because then at least you know where the fuck he actually is.

What you aren't expecting is for the body you're searching for to round the corner from the opposite direction at the same time as you and collide into you.

You must _both_ be on edge because you react like trained soldiers. You both skitter back and, as if finely choreographed, his sickles are out just as your hand hits the hilt of your sword. It takes you a few seconds of blind defensive fright to figure out that it's just him and he's not much of a threat, but you slide the sword out anyway, the metal of its blade whispering against the holster and echoing off of the otherwise silent corridor walls.

You are facing one another down like old enemies, watching each others' movements carefully, weapons at the ready.

What the fuck are you doing.

You make a small movement, to lower your weapon, and Karkat reacts unexpectedly, his posture bowing a little lower and his fangs baring themselves through the shadows. He makes this little noise, this totally fucking inhuman warning noise that reminds you of the crackling of electricity but much deeper, much more guttural, and you have your sword right the fuck back up against because _fuck no_ , he is _not_ going to randomly attack you for no fucking reason and get a hit in, you do not trust that fucking noise for the life of you.

Another long stretch of nothing.

Finally, he shifts. He takes one sidestep to his right. Then another, and another, never once facing his body away from you and never once relaxing his arms from where they have those sheening, fucking sharp sickles at his sides. They might look like shitty weapons from a distance, but you've seen the fuckers up close and personal. One well-aimed swipe could slice your head clean off your fucking neck. And you know damn well that Karkat is seasoned enough in fighting to pull something like that off.

You keep a steady eye on him as he slowly circles around you. Your sword is still ready, just in case, but this is just fucking weird, something is _definitely_ wrong.

"Karkat," you try quietly, amicably. "Put the weapons away, man."

"Keep out of my way, Dave," he growls back and his voice is so fucking _foreign_ to you that it actually freaks you out. You've heard him angry, you've heard him _bristling_ with rage, you've heard him at his loudest and his screamiest and his most fucking angrily triumphant but you have never heard something so scathing and so dangerous come out of that troll's mouth before. Not ever.

It's an actual growl. Animalistic, straight from the pit of his stomach, vibrating up through his chest.

It takes you a minute to recover.

"Dude, what happened?" You are trying your damnedest to keep your voice calm and so far, fortunately, it hasn't betrayed you. "It's just Dave, calm down…"

And the fucker… _hisses_ at you.

He fucking _hisses_ at you, like an angry mutant bobcat that's just been backed into the most defenseless corner and is about to unleash some crazy alien maulings on your squishy human ass if you don't step the fuck off.

"I said," he rumbles again, and he's just about all the way around you, now. You've been turning in a small circle to track his movement. "keep away from me." 

God, what the hell is going on?

"Karkat--"

"Do NOT," he snaps, and there is an ACTUAL, literal snap of his teeth in there. "even think about following or finding me."

It takes all of your pride (and all of your courage, goddamn) to slowly lower your weapon. Kind of like a truce; something's obviously spooked him to the point of not knowing friend from enemy and challenging him to a fight is probably the WORST decision you could follow through with right now. You may be strife-crazy but you're not stupid, and you don't have a real, _actual_ death wish. You even drop all of the questions you want to ask him, about the slimy shit and the recent reclusive bullshit and why the fuck his dick was squirming like it was alive in his pants and why a few days ago he was totally cool with you and now he's practically threatening to chop you to pieces. 

All you feel like you can do to be helpful right now is bow out of a potential fight like a dog with its goddamn tail between its goddamn legs.

You're hoping that this painfully embarrassing little show of submission on your behalf will be enough to chill him out, but it doesn't. He stays just as alert as he finishes half-circling you, and doesn't turn his back on you until he's backed up halfway down the goddamn hallway. And once that back is turned, he's fucking booking it like he's expecting you to whip a semi-automatic out of your sylladex and finish him off with a bullet in the back.

The tip of your sword hitting the floor is too loud for your own ears.

 

\- - -

 

She's still in Can Town, but now she's moved onto adding to the wall mural. She can't draw worth shit, probably because she's _fucking blind_ , but you gotta give her credit for how much fun she has with it, regardless.

She senses you coming again, and she senses distress in you. You round the corner and freeze when her head immediately whips around to face you.

"Coolkid?" she asks without hesitation, and her hand falls from the wall.

Reel it in, Strider. Don't fucking worry her. You're here for one reason, one reason _only_ , and that reason is NOT to tell her about anything that just happened.

"Yeah," you reply, burying the quiver in your voice, brushing off the wobbling in your knees. "yeah, I'm back."

One eyebrow lifts a little above a red lens and she sniffs the air delicately. "Are you… _sweating_?"

"I ran." Not a lie, not technically, you _did_ sort of jog. Power-walk. Whatever. "Uh. I changed my mind. About hanging out."

Her invisible eyes continue to stare blankly in your direction.

"…still wanna hang out? Just the two of us? And, uh." What are the implications, here? What were _her_ implications to begin with? Only one way to find out for sure, right? Do you even _care_ at this point, with your heart pounding and your head all fucking confused? Either way, you need a distraction right now like you would never fucking believe. "And talk or. Whatever it is you wanted to do?"

One more second of hesitation before that grin spreads back over her mouth and she extends a hand toward you.

You step over the town hall to take it.


	7. Chapter 7

You don’t mean to fall asleep but you do; maybe it’s a defense mechanism or maybe it’s all the damn cuddling, but it’s a brief and fitful sleep and you’re awake again before you know it with a paranoid, ugly feeling in your stomach.

You really need to calm the fuck down. It’s embarrassing how on-edge Karkat’s managed to make you with what seems like barely any effort on his behalf. Just some bared fangs, some freaky hissy noises, and brandishing his weapons. You’ve come up against fucking _way worse_ than that and he, the smallest troll you’ve encountered so far, is the one thing that’s making you hit the goddamn roof.

You wake up with your arms and cape wrapped around Terezi’s still-slumbering form and immediately try to think of a way to slip out of there without jarring her. You’re not afraid of it being awkward – you didn’t go into anything drunk or inhibited in any way, you had your makeouts and you both copped some feels right there in the middle of Can Town under the shroud of your cape and it was clumsy and awesome and _exactly_ what you needed to NOT think about anything for a little while.

But the kisses and wandering hands have stopped and now you’re thinking again. Not about what all the contact meant, not about whether or not you are technically dating a troll now (not that you’d really care if you were; you sort of need to be flexible with species now that your entire fucking planet is gone), but about what the hell went down in that hallway a handful of hours ago.

A few more minutes are uselessly wasted on trying to figure out a way to quietly detangle from Terezi’s hold on you until you remember, fucking gigantic dumbass that you are, that you CAN stop and slow time. Your powers are _severely_ limited on the meteor it seems, but you think you have enough pull to be able to bend shit to your will long enough to detach.

And you do. It quickly became childs play once you really got the hang of it. The rise and fall of Terezi’s chest as she breathes is so slow that it’s nearly unnoticeable as you slip yourself away from her grasp and make your way across Can Town to the corner of the hallway. Time resumes as normal once you’ve slipped around the corner toward the pantry.

Speak of the fucking high-strung dangerous little devil, himself.

He’s in there, groggily collecting some food, looking like he’s either just woken up from the worst sleep of his life or hasn’t slept a single fucking wink at all. You freeze at the doorway, all of your traitorous fucking muscles seizing up the moment he turns his own head to look at you.

This was the dude who only, what, a week ago maybe, had you pinned down underneath him on a sofa while he kissed the fucking breath right out of you. And now you feel like you’re facing some sort of wild, feral creature.

Instead of freaking the fuck out again like you’re expecting him to, though, he blinks tiredly at you, takes his food up in his arms and fucking leaves without a word.

Yeah, no, sorry Karkat. Not going to get away that easily. Nobody brushes off a Strider.

You follow him to the entrance of the room, where you pause at the doorway. “Vantas!” you bark, sharp as your voice will let you, and it’s enough to jerk him to a halt. He jumps a little, stops walking, and immediately turns to look at you, his golden eyes widened, his posture stiff and tense.

You duck your head a little, peering at him over the rim of your sunglasses.

His muscles don’t relax, but his expression does, minutely. 

His eyes trail toward the grate almost directly beside him.

When they flick back up to you, you think you might be starting to understand what he’s playing at.

He straightens up again. The hand at his side _not_ facing the vent gives you the hold-on-a-second finger raise, and his chin juts in a follow-me kind of fashion, so quick and so inconspicuous that if you weren’t watching him as closely as you were on instinct, you definitely would have missed it.

The relief that you’re feeling is so intense that it forced a long exhalation from your lungs that you didn’t even realize you’d been holding in. He turns on his heel and disappears down the hallway, and you count to thirty in your head before you follow him, your steps slow and casual, just in case.

You don’t need to ask where you’re going.

 

-  -  -

 

The biggest advantage to Karkat’s little hole in the meteor, you’re realizing, is that it’s one of the only rooms that actually doesn’t have any kind of ventilation system attached to it at all. You’re thinking probably the stuffiness of the room could get a little annoying but overall, not having a crazy pair of eyes on you at all times is a good trade.

You can’t really tell what you’re walking into, but as a precaution your hand comes to rest over the hilt of your sword as you pass over Karkat’s threshold. You shut the door behind you, and he says, “Lock it.” without even turning back around to look at you.

Good plan. You do just that, without taking your eyes off of him. A little difficult, but you manage.

Your hand flies back to your sword when he finally faces you and you see that his sickles are out again. Jesus fucking Christ, does the guy ever stop? You are totally NOT in the mood for a rumble right now, especially not in an enclosed fucking _locked_ space like this, but he surprises you by placing his weapons on his desk, just beside where he’s placed his gutted walkie talkies for the time being.

Oh. Okay.

You slide the sword from its holster and lean it up against the wall next to the door. There. Truce. Only weapon in the game now is Karkat and his goddamn claws, but you doubt it’s gonna come to that.

“Well?” you prompt, spreading your arms a little. “Here I am. Now you wanna tell me what the fuck is going on with you lately?”

He leans back a little, half-sitting on the edge of the desk, his arms coming up to cross defensively across his chest. “It’s… pretty complicated,” he replies. His voice is steady and even and strong despite how quiet his volume is.

“No shit. I’m kind of getting used to everything about trolls being complicated.”

He glowers at you. “If you don’t want to fucking listen, then why did you ask.”

You shut up. Because you DO want to hear what he has to say and you know that if you keep getting on his nerves, he’s probably just going to kick you out and you’ll be back at square one. Or he’ll lodge one of his sickles into your brain and you’ll be back at square dead. Neither of these options are especially appealing.

He pauses, waiting for the expected interjection from you, but when it doesn’t come he licks his lips and continues. “My relationship with Gamzee is getting strange. It’s been a long time coming and I don’t know how to fuck I didn’t _see_ it coming, shit, maybe I didn’t want to.” He shrugs a shoulder. “But it’s… strained, right now. Getting one-sided. Which isn’t exactly what a moirailegience is supposed to be. We’re supposed to be able to lean on each other and keep each other straightened the fuck out. We’re supposed to have one another’s backs. If he needs me, I’m there without question. If I need him, he’s here without question. _That_ is how it’s supposed to be.”

“Essentially you’re bros?”

He nods a little. “Sure. Bros. Whatever you say. That’s the gist, I guess.”

“So what’s going on? He pussing out on you these days?”

He stiffens a little and you realize that maybe that wasn’t the right wording to use. Before you can correct yourself and try again, though, he’s responding.

“Guess you could say that. It’s mostly me, now. I’m still bringing his stringy stupid ass food even though he probably doesn’t need me to anymore. I’m still visiting him even when he ignores my fucking presence half the time. Sometimes he’s not even in the vents and I’m in there for no fucking reason. He doesn’t say hi to me through the grates anymore. He barely even talks to me when we ARE in the same room together.” He huffs out an annoyed breath. “I know I’m probably not the best fucking moirail that any snobby, shitsticked highblood could ask for but I’m trying my goddamn best and I thought I was doing right by him.”

“Dude, _fuck_ yeah you were,” you intervene. “You were depleting everyone else’s food rations just to make sure HE was staying fed, that’s gotta count for something.”

He actually manages to look a little sheepish. “Not my smartest decision.”

“Hey man, we’ve all been there. I’ve done some _crazy_ stupid-ass shit in my life, I tell you. Shit so stupid that it doesn’t even make sense.”

He snorts softly. “Yeah, you don’t have to pull my arm, I believe you.”

You smirk. Just a little. Because you kinda made him laugh (a snort counts) and it felt nice. 

“So.” He takes in a deep breath, lets it out in a sharp whoosh. “He’s been having these really bizarre, really fucked up dreams and freaky religious revelations lately and just isn’t really sleeping anymore. I mean, _I_ don’t sleep all that much either, but it’s different. I can take care of myself. Gamzee is like, is like…” He pauses, searching for the correct term that won’t simultaneously sound like he’s shitting all over him. “…he is literally like a giant grub. Just a giant fucking squirming, helpless grub. He’s a newborn ruled by these imbecilic, miraculous fucking Messiah fantasies that blur his common sense and it’s fucking _exhausting_.”

“Because you’re stuck playing Mama Karkat.”

His eyelids lower. He’s not amused by that.

You shrug a little. “If the shoe fits.”

He chooses this time to fall quiet (after the expected “fuck you” prerequisite that comes along with any jab taken at him no matter how big or small) and sort of stare at the floor for a second, like he’s thinking about what he wants to say next. If there’s anything you _absolutely are_ , it’s a go-getter. An opportunist. This is the pocket of silence that you need to bull-rush in with all of the nagging curiosities that have been plaguing you since the previous day, starting with the most prominent one.

“While we’re on the subject of people going completely fruitcake bananas,” you speak up, getting comfortable with your back against the locked door. “you wanna maybe explain to me why you were literal seconds away from slicing me apart like a goddamn Thanksgiving turkey in the halls last night?”

“What’s Thanksgiving.”

“No no, I’m not playing teacher right now. I’ll tell you about every single thing my species celebrates in the fucking Complete Collection of Holidays Deriving from Various and Usually Fucking Ridiculous Human Religions For Dummies handbook later if you want a bedtime story or something. For now, answer the question.”

His eyes tighten a little at the corners. “That would be where it gets complicated.”

“I can take it, mama, lay it on me.”

There’s the clenching of the jaw, you were wondering where that was. “Can you _not_ with the fucking mama horseshit right now, please,” he grinds out. “I am _not_ a brood mother and most importantly I am not _Gamzee’s_ brood mother.”

“A’right, that’s fine, I hear you. Clear as mud, won’t call you mama again. Or did that just count as calling you mama? …is that twice, now?”

God, the glare he gives you, it’s infuriating and amusing all at the same time. When he glares it’s so different from his typically disinterested and tired expression, all of his facial lines and muscles and angles suddenly pull together and sharpen and fucking all the gods in the universe help you but you want to kiss that glare right off of his fucking smug face and whoa what bush did that thought just slither out of.

“Finished?” There’s a tired edge to his voice, like he really just doesn’t want to deal with you anymore.

“Yeah,” you reply. “but only because I really am curious about the whole let’s attack Dave fit you threw last night. I’m officially all ears. Go.”

He heaves a sigh – a bit of an overdramatic one, if you were to be totally honest. Whatever. Right now the guy’s got his shit, he sort of has the right to be a little drama princess if he feels so inclined. "Let's just throw ourselves right into it, then, because you don't really need to know my history with Gamzee to get the point. He saw the mark."

Huh? "The mark?"

"The one you left on my _neck_ , asshat," he says through his teeth.

Heheh. "Ah. That one. I said I was sorry bro, not like I can take it back or anything. I can't exactly _un_ suck."

"Dave, shut up."

"Okay."

He takes another exasperated breath. Man, maybe you are harder to deal with than you thought.

"He wasn't happy because he doesn't fucking trust you. Not that I blame him, you did sort of single-handedly snip apart all of the fucking security blankets he'd spent years swaddling himself in with a pair of dull, completely ignorantly malicious scissors."

"Yeah," you supply. "Oops."

"' _Oops_ ' is a pretty generically blasé way to fucking respond to something like that." You shrug, his glower deepens considerably, but he keeps going anyway. "He has been in a really bad place lately and I've been sneaking him my sopor slime to keep him calmer."

You raise an eyebrow. "So you can eat and drink that shit?"

"No, it's not recommended. I'm not feeding it to him. I'm putting it on him."

The look on your face, even with your shades on, must be all kinds of fucking confused (maybe even a little disgusted) because he sighs irritably. A THIRD sigh? You're starting to feel like you might be more trouble than you're worth to this guy.

"You don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, do you? Do you know what sopor does?"

You smirk a little. Ahaha, you got one on him now. "No, because the last time I tried to ask you told me it was none of my goddamn business."

Point goes to you - he seems to physically deflate. It shows more in his face than his posture. "…fine, what the fuck ever. Sopor is… it's like a sedative. We fill our recuperacoons with it and typically we sleep in it because it wards off nightmares. Gamzee is…" He pauses. "Gamzee is oblivious a lot of the time when it comes to me because I'm his moirail and he trusts me implicitly, so every time he wants me to just play with his hair or his horns or something--"

"Whoa, kinky," you interject. "isn't that like erogenous for you guys or something?"

He scowls. "What? _No_. It's not like that, you ignorant prick. It comforts him, lulls him, so I do it to make him fucking happy, okay?"

You raise your hands defensively. "Fair enough."

"I've started sneaking some sopor onto my hands and massaging it into his scalp, and it's… actually been working. Fucking surprise; usually when I have an idea that I think will work, it backfires in exceptionally explosive ways. I actually thought I had my shit and his shit under control for awhile."

He goes quiet again, you're assuming only for a brief period of time. But you hate stretched silences like this during interestingly and ominously serious discussions so your Douchebag Switch is triggered and you can't stop the words before you burp them out. "I see. Should we play a word association game next? Tell me the first thing that comes to mind when I say 'flower'."

Something in his throat thrums warningly. " _Strider_..."

"Ah. Interesting, wasn't expecting that one." 

"You're not my fucking defective thinksponge professional, Dave, and I'm seconds away from kicking you the fuck out."

You press your lips into a purposefully thin line. Nope. Not gonna talk. Done now.

“Usually he dozes off as a result,” he continues, and there’s the slightest hint of hesitation in his voice because he’s probably expecting you to cut him off with something fucking stupid again, but you keep your lips the way they are just to make a point. “Not a deep sleep, but just enough to relax him. When he does, I put some of the sopor on his back where he won’t notice it when he snaps out of it.”

That would explain why the levels of slime in his coon thing seemed lower and why he's looked like literal death warmed over lately. Instead of using it up on himself by sleeping in it, he’s been taking little bits at a time to his vent monster for his off-nightly little slime massages. 

If there was ever a perfect middle point between stupid and selfless, Karkat would be it.

“Wouldn’t it be like, sticky or something?” you ask, because you feel like you’re allowed to talk if it’s a legitimate question.

His turn to shrug. “It dries and flakes off pretty quickly if you’re not submerged in it.”

“Dang. You’re kind of a genius sometimes, Vantas.”

He gives you a sharp bark of laughter in response, bitter and sarcastic. “Wouldn’t that be fucking convenient for us all? Thanks for the poorly timed and ill-directed compliment Dave, but no. In this sense, I definitely fucked up.”

“How did you fuck up, you’re keeping the beast at bay all on your own, here.”

“I fucked up because he caught me.”

 _Oh_.

Your mind instantly flashes back to the frantic, animalistic anger in Karkat’s eyes the night before, the way he seemed to see you as an enemy, period, no room for camaraderie, something that he would rather kill than risk keeping alive, the way he bared his fangs and hissed like a goddamn rattler at you, the way he transformed into something you’d never seen out of him before. 

You are suddenly incredibly uncomfortable. 

You may have your wide margin of various personal differences but the guy is still your friend when you dig right down to the core of it. The idea of somebody fucking with your friend’s head so aggressively that the aggression is essentially transferred into him is _really, really not okay_.

“What did he do to you?” you ask, and you want it to be a question but it comes out as more of a demand. You kind of hope he doesn’t notice but by the way he blinks confusedly before settling into a suspicious frown, you reckon he definitely at least caught on to your tone.

“Nothing,” he says slowly. “Moirails aren’t like that. They don’t attack each other, and he certainly wouldn’t attack me.”

You want to ask, how does he fucking know that for sure, but you don’t because impeding any further into this strange and blaringly unhealthy by human standards relationship between Karkat and his pet juggalo would only mean trouble for you. The kind of trouble you DON’T want, to clarify.

You start to open your mouth to say something else, instead, but he beats you to it with a serious, dead-panned, “But that doesn’t mean he won’t attack you.”

You knit your eyebrows together. Now you’re confused. “Not that I don’t think I can’t hold my own against him because hello, god tier, freaky regenerative shit over here, but what the fuck does the slime you’ve been buttering all over him have to do with me? I didn’t even know what the shit did until a few seconds ago.”

“Six degrees of separation,” he replies and you find yourself holding back the inexplicable urge to grab him by his bony shoulders and shake him. “He caught me trying to sneak him the sopor because I was flustered. I was flustered because he was pissed off. He was pissed off because of the mark you left on my fucking neck.”

… _oh_ , shit. 

“So it’s a jealousy thing,” you offer.

“Yes and no.”

“Karkat, man you’re really flip-flopping on me today, I feel like this conversation is a labyrinth or something except I don’t even know what the fuck I’m solving it for. There’s no baby brother being held in a castle by a studly eighties glam-rocker in hypnotizing tights. Instead there’s a big old ominous dirty ventilation room where a fucking nutbag clown is waiting for me, and _apparently_ he’s really just waiting for the chance to tear off all of my limbs and reattach them to my body in places where they don’t belong or didn’t originally grow out of and I feel cheated because shit, I don’t even get to make friends with any creepy but loveable fucking muppets on the way there.”

“What the _fuck_ are you talking about?” Karkat snaps. “You aren’t making any fucking sense, are you delirious and stupid with fear or something right now?”

“No, dude, but I ain’t gonna lie, it’s a little weird and intimidating having the creepy fucker hold a vendetta against me just for macking on his best friend a little.”

He waves a hand at you, like he’s signaling for a petulant little kid to shut the hell up. “Okay, listen to me; it’s less jealousy and more protectiveness. A strong moirailegience includes keeping one another out of trouble, and to him, you’re fucking trouble, Dave.”

“Why did you even tell him it was me, anyway?” This, you’re honestly curious about.

“I didn’t. He figured it out on his own. He’s smarter than you take him for.”

“Well shit.”

“Yeah. The combination of figuring out that we were—“ His eye contact with you wavers, then drops away, off to the side. “— _involved_ outside of a quadrant and figuring out that I was sneaking him sopor set him off. I calmed him down without the slime’s aid, which was NOT fucking easy in case you were wondering, and got out of there as soon as I could, but I know he watches and listens to _everything_. You think you’re having a private moment in your respiteblock? Sorry to inform you, but chances are you’re probably not alone.”

That little revelation makes you feel kind of queasy. “Okay that’s the ticket to keeping me from sleeping for the next two years, thanks for that.”

“It’s his fucking broken way of socializing I guess, I don’t know.”

You hate how much sense this is starting to make because it’s still fucking ridiculous. “So all of that bullshit last night…”

“An act,” he finishes for you, casual as you please.

“Because he was probably watching us.”

“Watching us while beyond fuming, yes. _Beyond_ the handle. He hurled himself off of that a long time ago, which is probably why he's so fucking easy to tip off now that he's not eating the sopor anymore. And also why we’re talking in _here_ and not out there. I don't have vents.”

You're at an impasse now. What to question first? The eating of sopor which Karkat has already explicitly said should _not_ be a thing, or the fact that if you leave the room, will you still wake up the next morning?

"I thought you said you couldn't eat it." You're a man of action and bravery, with the exception of today.

"You _shouldn't_ ," he clarifies irritably. "He used to. It fucked him up, made him harmless and relaxed and fucking stupid, and as much as I hate to admit that it really was rotting his brain, sometimes I wish he'd just stayed on it."

You're suddenly picturing this HUGE extravagant intervention. Karkat has gathered most of the trolls to a rented hotel room and Gamzee walks in with a bottle of Gatorade (but who the fuck actually knows if it's really Gatorade) in his hand and sunglasses over his silly clown face and he stops at the doorway all 'yo what miracle of miracles is this miracle, miracle?' when he sees everyone gathered around with Troll Jeff VanVonderen or some shit sitting like an intimidating court judge in the middle of it all. Except instead of turning around and telling everyone to get the goddamn miracle-cameras out of his miraculous face, he just up and slaughters the whole lot except for Karkat, who is left to be drenched in the blood of their mutual peers and spiral slowly into insanity.

Wow, your brain needs a lot of fucking help.

"Okay, moving on." Because you don't want to relay all of that to Karkat. He'll probably snap and kick you out to the mercy of the juggalo wolves. "If I leave this room and go back to my own to sleep tonight. what's going to happen?"

He crosses his arms, slouching his posture a little. "How the fuck should I know."

"I mean, he didn't come after me last night, so… what, is he waiting for a fucking invitation or something?"

Bitterness rushes across his face so obviously and torrentially that you couldn't miss it even if you were on the other side of the goddamn meteor.

"Of course he didn't come after you last night," he responds, and his voice has hermitted itself into a defensive monotone, betraying fucking nothing. It's crazy unsettling. You don't like it. "you were with Terezi all night."

Karkat is usually really good about keeping his more vulnerable feelings way the hell away from you, and suddenly you find yourself staring right into them. He's presenting them to you openly, on the silver fucking platter that is his face.

You don't know what to say about it.

You're quiet for an uncomfortable amount of time. You aren't expecting words to abandon you the way they just have. You have a fucking comeback for everything. Everything except, apparently, Karkat when he's upset.

He's staring you dead in the eyes. Challenging you to brush his feelings aside like an asshole. 

You can't. Not this time.

You awkwardly shuffle past it, like it was a dead animal in the middle of a busy street; part of you wants to look, the other doesn't want to acknowledge it, it's too sad, too jarring.

"So what do I do now."

He looks like he knows the answer, but he's looking at you in this particular way like really doesn't want to tell you because he doesn't think you deserve to know.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so I exist, I'm still a human-y fleshy thing. 
> 
> thank you so much for hanging around this crazy little story while I've been dealing with really stupid Real Life Things. sorry to keep it hanging for so long, and also sorry that most of this chapter is just really TALKY. shit will absolutely go down in the next installment.
> 
> and, the usual tumblr-pimp! I am over at: bbbbangarang.tumblr.com - come say hi. :)
> 
> * * *

So that was a bust.

Can’t really blame anyone other than yourself, either.

It became pretty clear that Karkat wasn’t going to offer you much help; you already hit the conclusion that something in the contact between you two actually held _some_ sort of meaning to him (you just don’t know what, or how strong – it’s pretty easy to see, though, he’s not hiding it very well) but you weren’t prepared for him to stand his ground the way he did. You were pretty stupid to assume he’d rip himself totally apart for you. This IS Karkat you’re talking about. He’s got his whiney moments but motherfuck is he a stubborn mule when he needs to be, and he’s _definitely_ not a pushover. You can’t break a guy like him that easily; it takes more than a pair of well-practiced puppy dog eyes to crack him. Especially since you always have your damn shades on when you try the puppy-eyes thing and forget they’re there like a fucking idiot.

He kind of just sent you on your way, told you he’d let you know when he needs you for the walkie talkie project thing again. That was that. Probably for the best, too – the whole clown-in-the-vents-hating-your-guts thing was really starting to unsettle you and you felt like maybe having some time to yourself to work out a game plan in case the fucker decided to make a move against you would be a good idea.

Except after you left, you remembered that Karkat’s room is the only one without vents. Hell of a time to accidentally forget that little nugget of knowledge, you colossal dumbass.

 _You_ dropped the ball on that one. Looks like you’ll be sharing your plans with the elusive, mouthbreathing nutball after all.

You aren’t necessarily afraid of him, no. Death is a fear you learned to put on the backburner awhile ago, _especially_ once you reached God Tier and suddenly dying was nothing more than a pain in the ass inconvenience to you. A fly buzzing around your food. A small pebble in your shoe. An eye-roll-and-heavy-sigh-inducing fucking hindrance.

You stop abruptly, halfway down the corridor, like someone just dropped a brick wall down in front of you.

…then what is it, if it’s not fear?

This is probably something you should have thought about before.

This is probably something you’ve _tried_ to think about before but got too distracted to follow through with.

Distracted or concerned?

Concerned or paranoid?

Paranoid or in denial?

 _Whoa_. 

There it goes, that sure was a moment you had just now.

Not just any moment, either; you just got straight-up psychological with yourself in only a couple of six-degrees-separated words that coincided with one another WAY too easily. You aren’t as distracted as you think. You aren’t concerned about anything and you sure as shit aren’t paranoid. But until now, until only a few seconds ago, you have most definitely without a fucking doubt been in denial about something.

To a certain extent, you still kind of are.

But a revelation like the one that just stopped you in your tracks like it physically slapped you stripped most of that denial down because it all but forced you to fucking face something, something that’s been just casually screaming at the top of its proverbial lungs at you from the back of your own head and you were too caught up in other shit going on to pay attention to it.

God _damnit_.

Your feet finally find movement again, but they don’t take you in the direction that you originally intended them to.

 

-  -  -

 

Phobias were always one of those little things that sort of fascinated you. It’s like how some people can’t get enough of the psychology of serial killers or how weirder shit like if colours are actually the same to everyone, or if everyone sees them differently. Weird, cool mental shit that passes through peoples’ heads and gets stuck there. A nagging curiosity, something to look up and learn about as a result of boredom. 

For you, it was never something that you cared enough about to research for hours on end, but yeah, you find phobias pretty damn interesting and you’ve ALWAYS wondered why people develop different ones, and why some of them are so fucking _strange_ (you saw in passing, once, that the phobia representing a fear of long words is actually the longest fucking word you’ve ever seen in your life, the level of irony in it was practically hazardous, it almost blew out a fuse in your brain, it was totally and wholly and unadulteratedly _magnificent_ ) – and, more importantly, why you wound up with the one that is the MOST cliché. 

There is a very good reason why you’ve stopped in front of the huge vent instead of just hauling ass inside to see what’s going on in the guts of this building. You already know that the grating is removable. You figure that you and Karkat are about equal in muscle mass and strength (you just happen to be a little taller) so if he could do it, you definitely can. 

But you aren’t. Yet.

You’re hesitating.

Because the idea of shoving your body into the tight little tunnel that sits between everything familiar to you and who knows what fucking kind of circus shitshow actually, legitimately scares the hell out of you. You would RATHER come up against the clown, face to face, than wedge yourself on in there like a fucking q-tip in an ear canal.

Too bad your thing is time and not teleportation.

You raise your hands toward the grate.

Drop them.

Raise them again. Drop them, frustrated now, and shuffle in a small, nervous circle like a gigantic wiener. You heave a big, heavy sigh, rub the back of your neck, and move back toward the grate.

This time your fingers actually make contact and curl between the bars. You give the grate a yank and it pops off of the wall without a fuss. It's not as heavy as you were expecting it to be.

You set it against the wall off to the side and ground yourself a little before you peer into the bleak darkness of the tunnel. You can't see for shit, there isn't even a fucking pinprick of light at the end of it to go on. You have to give Karkat a shitload of credit right then and there for hoisting himself right up into this fucking sphincter of black nothingness just to get to his friend.

Not one to be shown up, obviously, you go for it. Because you're an asshole and you want credit, too.

Crawling in initially isn't so bad, but the very idea of moving forward has every muscle locked up. _Focus, man,_ your mind hisses at you harshly and you scowl into the darkness, take another breath, and start crawling.

It's the most nerve-wrecking, pants-shitting five minutes (if that) of your life. You heard about this haunted house once that ran in New York, that was totally hands-on and subjected people (who had to go through alone AND sign a waiver and shit) to some of the subconscious's worst, darkest fears. One part of it included a small, closed-in tunnel like this one with an actor hiding out in it. You think of this now, as you slowly shuffle forward on your knees and elbows, except up ahead isn't a paid, professional actor who knows his limitations on what he can and cannot legally do to you - up ahead is a fucking psychotic alien motherfucking clown troll who is just _waiting_ to sink his fucking teeth into your neck or bash your skull in with his juggle-clubs and feast on your succulent, plentiful brains, shit, he's probably getting off up there just thinking about it.

You stopped about twenty seconds ago without even realizing it. You think you see something shift in the darkness up ahead as your eyes struggle to adjust. You would really like pretend that it was your mind playing fucking games with you but jesus, can you actually rely on that considering the circumstances?

You keep moving.

Eventually, quicker than you expect, your eyes adjust enough to finally make out the basic shape of the tunnel ahead of you - more importantly, how much of it is left - and the circular exit that is your shining beacon of freedom. NOBODY would probably believe you if you told them just how shitty this claustrophobic horseshit makes you feel, but you're _really_ feeling it now, gnawing away at the edges of your stomach. 

After what seems like an eternity of crawling and shuffling and worming forward and trying to desperately latch onto your dignity by NOT making any of the noises politely knocking at the back of your throat, you reach out a hand and your fingers hit the edge of the wall around the tunnel and slightly cooler air.

You pull yourself out of that motherfucker with more speed and gusto than you expect. You, of course, spill out onto the floor as a result, but you finally feel like you can breathe again and while you slowly rise to your feet and dust yourself off, you don't notice that you are being very pointedly approached.

Not until he's only feet away from you.

Your movements freeze and you slowly bring your head up. He's easily a foot (if not more, holy fucking shit) taller than you and the smile creeping onto his face is undeniably unhinged. His horns are huge up close like this. Huge and sharp. Your general intestinal and gut areas do not like the looks of his horns much at all. You are facing down a personified nightmare, and you can't be upset because you definitely asked for it by coming here in the first place.

Your eyes fall to his hands when his wrists suddenly flick casually at his sides. Twirling those god-awful clubs across the web between his thumbs and index fingers.

The sword is out of your strife specibus so fast that Bro is most likely rising from his goddamn grave wherever the fuck it is just to give you a big old rotting thumbs up _no, nonono, no way man, don't think about that right now, okay?_

The clown's grin grows a fraction wider.

He actually looks fucking _happy_. Really, genuinely happy.

That's fucked up.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> still truckin'. I've gotten some really rad comments the past few days - you're all great and awesome and thank you SO much for sticking with me. :D
> 
> so hey, if anyone out there is in particular a fan of BroJohn as a pairing, or likes good writing in general, head over to my moirail's fanfic [Single Origin](http://archiveofourown.org/works/888028/chapters/1712297) and show 'em some love. they're a great writer and really embrace characterization. I'm endeared by barista!John, myself.
> 
> * * *

You’ve wanted to get into music production for as long as you can remember, but on the side, deep down and usually unspoken, you also kind of wanted to be some sort of superhero. It’s funny in retrospect, considering everything that’s happened. That seems normal for most kids, really, and Bro always kinda caught on that you wanted to be this strong, swift, stealthily powerful and undeniably cool dude (hell, kind of like him) when you grew up. He always challenged you and pushed you and Christ if he didn’t give you criticism when you fucked up but he also praised you when you did well, too, and that was really important. The positivity strengthened your confidence. The negativity only pushed you to try harder. Bro may not have been the BEST father figure you could have ever asked for, but he was a damn great teacher.

Unfortunately, you don’t really think anything could have prepared you for this particular encounter.

You don’t know what you were expecting, really. To talk? Have a quick little chat? Drop some beats compliment him on his makeup and walk out of there like everything was hunky fucking dory? Would’ve been cool if the winds blew that way for you, but those hadn’t exactly been your predetermined ideals while you were doing the elbow shuffle through your claustrophobic little nightmare.

At that point, the tunnel freaked you out more than he did.

Until he made his first move.

You were so stupid, thinking that this was going to be an easy showdown, and when he grinned that _freakishly_ happy smile at you and growled out, “Let’s dance, motherfucker” you actually almost laughed at him because it sounded so ominous and so damn _corny_ at the same time. Karkat DID warn you to keep your fucking distance and keep your fingers out of the cage but _no_ , you didn’t listen because you’re stubborn and you’re all up on this invincibility mindset just because you happened to reach God Tier. But, really, how likely do you think it is that your wounds will just easily heal if the guy is painting his walls with your brains?

You didn’t think of that, did you?

Of course not.

But you’re sure as shit thinking of it now, when you’ve barely managed to get a hit in and he is slamming you against a wall for the fourth time in the span of a minute, so hard that your back cracks unpleasantly and you swear your fingertips are tingling and wait, shit, could you heal a snapped spine if he managed to actually break your back? Things you should have thought about before you attempted this confrontation. Boy Howdy did you ever fuck yourself over, here.

He’s fast, and what’s unnerving you the most is that he’s fast WITHOUT messing with time – something you’ve taken to unwisely relying on for your speed. It’s likely that he knows aaaall the fuck about you and your little bendy powers and it seems like he’s calculating his movements and the way he strikes around them. He won’t even give you a moment of mental clarity to focus on anything.

His one downfall, you thought, was that he was starting to work kind of like a bad video game boss. He was becoming predictable and weaving himself into a pattern – throwing you across the room over and over isn’t exactly a great fighting technique, after awhile that shit just gets old and you’re _going_ to catch on and prepare yourself for it at some point.

But just as you think you got him figured out, one of his clubs – which has been out this _entire time_ and just lingering as a fucking backup option in case he gets bored, you guess – introduces itself very rudely into the tender bone of your ankle. Hard. Really hard. Way _way too fucking hard_. The resulting crack is something you can feel through your entire body.

He was only weakening you a little. Softening you up, kneading you around like hamburger meat until the tenderizer came out.

You go down like you weigh a fucking metric ton.

The pain is pretty crazy, even you can’t deny that, and knocks you into a second-long state of dizziness. You know he knows exactly what he’s doing (Jesus, this asshole would give Bro the fucking strife of his _life_ , you are totally regretting this fight right now) so you rapidly try to blink the fuzz in your vision away, in time to see him looming closer to you. Slower, now. _Deliberately_ slower. He’s not just walking at you. He’s _stalking_ you. Playing with you. You are nothing but a little cloth mouse full of catnip to this fucking beast.

And that smile.

That goddamn _smile_. It’s only gotten bigger, fuller, like the guy has become _completely_ infatuated with you while he’s been kicking your ass all over his dingy hideout like a fucking hacky sack. You knew he was crazy, you went INTO this knowing he was crazy, but you never really saw crazy up close until you saw it staring down at you _adoringly_ as it slowly raised a club up to bash your skull in.

He doesn’t get that far, because it so happens that fate – in the form of a small, tightly wound ball of unnecessary anger – doesn’t want him to. You aren’t sure where the fuck he even came from, but a relatively large part of you is pretty damn happy to know that he’s there. The other part doesn’t really want his help. You’re trying to ignore that part.

“Gamzee.”

The voice is calm, but firm. You didn’t really think that anything would derail your buddy from finishing you off like you know he’s just _itching_ to do, but that one utterance of his name in that particular voice halts his movements effortlessly and immediately.

He’s still looking down at you, his club still half-raised and frozen in the air, but his grin has been extinguished completely. His face is now a blank slate. His eyes may be focused on you but his attention is successfully diverted.

You watch him closely, regardless.

You hear the footsteps before you see anything – slow and careful, edging themselves gingerly in your direction. He comes into view, this little wall of defiant black and gray, shuffling right up in front of you until you’re forced to look away from your opponent because you can’t see him anymore, Karkat is straight up _in your way_ now, but he’s placed himself there for a reason. His posture is straight and attentive, arms down by his sides, legs shoulder-width apart. He means business. That there is a stance that says ‘Oh hell no motherfucker I am not budging until you back down’.

You admire it. And it pisses you off.

It pisses you off a lot, actually.

“Karkat,” you growl, but he ignores you.

“Stop,” he tells the clown, and it’s in this really weird limbo between sounding like he’s talking to a misbehaving dog and talking to someone he cares about. Totally bizarre. Not angry, not hostile – more like slightly disappointed with just a _touch_ of a pleading undertone.

You don’t like that he just fucking brushed you off, but your ankle is _throbbing_ and your body feels pretty beat up and tired, so you shift your scowl away from Karkat’s back and lean around him a little, to peer up at your adversary. If his royal dicksack isn’t going to let you talk in his presence, you may as well watch for the kaboom from the other side of the conflict, right?

You are half-assedly expecting it not to. And you’re correct, it doesn’t.

The club is lowered, but so is the clown’s head. His eyes stare Karkat down intensely. His lips split again, this time not to grin but to bare his mouthful of sharpened teeth at the smaller troll with a hiss. You’re gathering that this is some sort of feral intimidation technique or something, and he is _so much taller_ that you’re expecting Karkat to deflate and back down.

Instead, he surprises you by repeating the gesture. At least, you gather that he’s repeating it. You see his shoulders hunch and his head bend forward a little and you hear the hiss he offers in response, but his isn’t as hostile. It sounds more like a warning, not a direct threat.

You have been removed from the communication spectrum entirely. You do not speak hissy alien. All you can do it hope that this doesn’t _completely_ tip the big guy into a fury that has you hauling Karkat’s ass out of there before he kills the BOTH of you.

You apparently don’t give Karkat enough credit where it’s rightfully due.

Totally beyond what you could have predicted, the taller of the two blinks once, twice, then straightens his posture. He takes a step back. And another.

Karkat suddenly takes his own step _toward_ him. One of his hands reaches up and out a little. “Gamzee–“

His voice has changed drastically. The desperate undertone is now up front and center, subdued but plainly there. And the clown ain’t having it. He responds by wordlessly turning away from the both of you and slinking off into the darkness of one of the many passageways leading through the room’s walls.

  


\- - -

  


You opt to go back to Karkat’s room.

Just feels like the best place to go, honestly.

He also seems to need somebody there with him right now. You may not be a master in troll relationships but you get the sense, by Karkat’s body language and sullen silence, that whatever just happened between him and his juggalo was not exactly okay.

To your surprise, he actually sort of tries to help you get back, too, but you’re a little embarrassed by the prospect because it’s just your damn ankle, you’ve _definitely_ been through worse and you don’t need him to babysit a tiny little injury that’ll heal itself over relatively easily. You decline with a begrudging, muttered thank-you, at first, but walking on it _sucks_ – you really can't, not without leaning on him while you do it. You get out of that fucking room, through the tunnel, and to your destination as briskly as the pain will let you.

You’re admittedly thankful when you get there and are able to sit down, though. The moment your ass hits his sofa, you kick off your shoe and roll up your pant leg to assess the damage to your ankle. It’s exactly what you expect; swollen, red, already bruising around the bone. You’re not sure if it’s broken, but it really feels like it could be. You aren’t about to touch it; you can imagine how fucking much it would hurt if you did.

Karkat makes his way over toward you, but he doesn’t come within close proximity. He leans back against his work desk, his hands cupping his elbows, watching you blankly. You raise your eyes to meet his, and lift an eyebrow.

“What?”

His own eyebrows pull forward and down. His lips tighten into a line, like he’s trying to think of the best way to rip into you verbally without being _too_ cruel. You do, after all, have a boo-boo to take care of, here.

After a few seconds, he gives up and sighs. “Do I even have to ask?”

You hike your pant leg up a little further and twist so that the side of your body that carries the injured leg is pivoted closer to the couch. You gently and slowly hoist your leg up so it’s elevated, resting along the cushions, making yourself right at home. “Depends on what you’re aimin’ to ask me.”

“What the _fuck_ made you think that that was a good idea?”

You’re impressed; so far he’s managed to keep the actual bite out of his voice.

“To be fair,” you reply as you lean back against the armrest. You can _feel_ where bruises are forming along the rest of your body. You don’t even need to look. “I didn’t _actually_ think it was a good idea. I didn’t really think anything about it, I just sort of decided that I wanted to go and pay your buddy a visit, so I did.”

“Despite the fact that I told you to keep away from him.”

“Sure.” You shrug. “Just exercising my free will, man. You ain’t _my_ grub-momma.”

His scowl deepens, but he refuses to touch that one. Again. “Then why the hell would you even bother? What purpose did you even go into that with?”

You… sort of need to think on that for a second, because you’re SURE you had a reason when the split-second decision was made, but you lost sight of it pretty quickly what with the tunnel and the paranoia and the royal beatdown that resulted from said decision.

You are seconds away from just telling him ‘Idunno’ but you’re thinking that maybe you could come up with something a little better than that.

“Because I like to flirt with stupid, dangerous shit,” you finally offer, and Karkat’s eyebrows twitch upward a little with a mixture of intrigue and surprise. Interesting reaction, that. “I thought for a second that maybe I could get some kind of interesting reason why he hates on me so hard. Sounds like a really lame, dumb decision now, but at the time it was reasonable enough.”

Karkat studies you.

“He’s not going to just talk to you. Idiot.” He shifts, removing his hands from his elbows to cross his arms completely over his torso. “Maybe your species is simple enough to be satisfied by holding hands and skipping through fields of fucking flowers and talking shit out but we don’t work that way.”

Your mouth twists up into a wry half-grin. “Yeah tell me about it.”

“What you did probably just cost me a quadrant. Do you even fucking get that?”

Here he goes with the quadrant thing again.

“How?” you feel yourself asking more curiously than skeptically. He digs the heel of a hand into his forehead and you tack on, “All you did was stop him from _probably fucking killing someone_ , I don’t really see how that’s gonna break you guys up or whatever.”

He takes a long breath. Two. Slowly lowers his hand, opens his eyes, and shifts backward to actually sit on the corner of his desk. “All right. Because I’m fucking tired and I don’t have the energy to deal with this dismissively, I’m going to explain a few things to you so that the next time you decide to meddle in troll relationships like an asshole, you’ll at least know what you’re fucking doing before you decide to do it.”

You instantly think of at least a dozen responses to that, but you keep your trap firmly shut because _you’re_ tired, too, and you kind of just want the discussion to be over so you can get some fucking rest.

He starts to glean over the types of relationships that trolls can have with each other and how there’s certain behaviours that are expected and also frowned upon in each one, but to be honest, you are not listening even a little. You _are_ , however, paying close attention to the way he uses his hands while he talks and the creases of determination to get his point across spreading over his forehead and between his eyebrows. You hate to admit that you’re also watching for the slight little flash of fang when his lips form around words a certain way. This is one of the reasons (other than showing vulnerability and general sensitivity to bright light) that you keep your shades on at all times. You can get away with staring and watching as much as you damn well want and nobody would know. Unless you start to space out. Which is sort of what you’re doing right now.

You suppose you’re kinda _with_ Terezi now, so you shouldn’t be gawking like this, but you can’t help yourself. You’re nearing sixteen very quickly (or hell, maybe you even ARE sixteen, you’re not sure – you haven’t really been clinging to the exact date lately so you kind of have no fucking idea where you even are in a standard year right now), you have hormones that have been very rarely used up until this point, and Karkat is hot when he’s lecturing you.

“Dave.”

And when he’s not lecturing you.

“Hey.”

And when he’s just standing there doing nothing.

“Are you even fucking listening to me or am I wasting my breath?”

You shift a little to maintain a comfortable enough position on his couch. You weren’t, but that’s okay, he doesn’t need to know that. “Yeah, dude, I’m listening.”

He squints at you skeptically. “So you get that by putting yourself in the fucking situation I just pulled you out of, you essentially made me turn against my moirail.”

You almost laugh with indignance because you are _pretty_ sure that you were the one being attacked. “Are you fucking kidding me? _You_ stepped in to be the hero, Karkat, how can you even be blaming me, here?”

“We all fucking NEED you, asshole. ALIVE. And things like that have to be done gently, especially with Gamzee, and _you_ -” He jabs a clawed finger in your direction. “-forced me into a situation where I had to act QUICKLY and not CAREFULLY.”

“I really don’t get why stopping him from bludgeoning someone to death is bad but that’s your thing, not mine. Lost in translation, I guess. You know I’m not into that quadrant shit.”

You say it before you realize exactly what you’re saying.

You never actually forgot when he admitted to wanting you in one of his potential quadrants, but the memory is especially sharp now.

He stays where he is, but you can SEE him emotionally withdraw from you. “Yeah, I’m aware,” he says evenly as he lowers his hand again, but there’s bitterness between the layers. Each word is punctuated with purposeful emphasis.

You’re such an asshole.

He wants you to realize it, too.

“What’s funny, though,” he tacks on, the sour undertone still present. “is that you continue to fucking bark that around even while you’re IN a quadrant.”

You lift an eyebrow. “Don’t remember consenting to that, but sure, man, whatever you say.”

“You’re in a relationship with Terezi, aren’t you?”

You shrug a shoulder, suddenly feeling pretty awkward talking to him about this. “Yeah, I guess.” You never actually officially discussed anything, but it _felt_ relationship-y enough.

“Then you’re in a quadrant,” he states, slowly, like you’re a fucking idiot.

Which you probably are. Judging by the way he rolls his damn eyes at your blank, silent response to that, he definitely thinks so, too.

“It might just feel like dating someone to you, Dave, but to us… to _her_ … it’s a quadrant.”

Oh.

“You’re her matesprit, Dave.”

 _Oh_.

A silence hangs between you – during which, Karkat’s expression falls flat, like he just realized something that should have been blaringly obvious to him and he can’t believe how stupid he was not to notice it.

“…fuck,” he blurts, posture straightening.

“What?”

“ _Fuck_ ,” he hisses again, pushing from the desk and waving a hand at you. “Stay put. I need to find Kanaya. I’ll be back.”

He’s gone before you can get him to calm his tits long enough to explain anything to you.

Your curiosity is piqued and you won’t deny that you might be a little concerned, too, but your body aches and your ankle is _the fucking worst_ and you’re really goddamn tired, so instead of chasing after him like the mother hen you were never meant and never expected to be, you settle yourself right down into the cushions, lean back, and wait.

You have a lot to think about right now, anyway.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know, the worst part about having this pre-planned as a four-story excursion is finally figuring out what I want to happen in the last segment and being NOWHERE NEAR ready to start writing it yet. bah. but at least the series is fleshing itself out fully, that's a good thing.
> 
> uhhhh not a whole lot of plot here, sorry guys. this is like filler. talking and emotional breakdowns and some other lukewarm physical stuff. the plot will pick itself back up again shortly. :)
> 
> * * *

You get a little bit of thinking done.

What you come up with, you don't think you like.

You're trying to piece things together. You DO finally figure out why he's been such a sulky, pouty baby around you the past day or two. You'd be acting like a bitch too, in his position.

You denied him a quadrant because you admittedly really _don't get it_ and because you don't get it, you don't exactly trust it. But then you turned around and sort of made the whatever-it-is with Terezi an actual thing, and even though you weren't looking at it as a quadrant through your own eyes, the trolls - especially Terezi and Karkat - were. 

You denied him a quadrant, coldly and mechanically, just before skipping off to unknowingly fill one with someone else.

He has every right to be upset.

You tilt your head back and frown up at the ceiling. Figures, the one time that you are ACTUALLY and REALISTICALLY the biggest dickhead in the now-nonexistent universe, it’s totally by accident.

You attempt to assess your feelings revolving around Karkat, but it's hard because you don't really like the idea of actually being emotional. You're a human being so obviously it's gotta happen sometimes, but life is a lot more tolerable when it's not complicated. And emotions complicate things.

You like him. That much you've figured out. You are physically attracted to him. You've figured that part out, too. You like the ladies, hell yeah, but you're also fine with certain types of dudes. There's no real characteristic that you 'look' for. They just gotta attract you like that. And Karkat, despite being a gray alien kid with horns and a quick temper and bad self-esteem issues and apparently a snakedick (uhhh), does.

But you're still stumbling over the quadrant thing.

Even moreso now the he's _kindly_ reminded you that you fell into one by accident. Sort of.

So now what.

 

\- - -

 

You’re startled awake when Karkat finally comes back and slams the door behind him.

You didn’t even realize you were drifting off to begin with. Whoops.

He doesn’t look happy. He doesn’t look panicked anymore either, though, which you take as a good sign. As he slowly crosses the room back to you, you shift to sit up a little more, fixing the shades that have gone askew on your nose during your little nap. You spare a quick glance down at your ankle. Thank fuck for God Tier, man. It’s still pretty banged up, but not nearly as bad as it was when you first got the injury. Slower healing than usual, but healing nonetheless. It pays to be one of the fuckin’ X-Men, hell yeah.

Satisfied with your assessment, you settle back against the armrest, hands folded with their fingers laced over your stomach. You watch as he heads toward you, stops at the opposite armrest at the other end of the couch, and half-sits on it. 

“So?” you prompt him. “Everything sunny in Philadelphia or do you need to talk it out?”

He doesn’t get the reference, but he doesn’t dwell on it. He’s too busy avoiding having to actually look at you, opting instead to watch his hands in his lap like they’re more interesting than you are. Which is total bull, nothing is more interesting than you are.

“Well,” he starts, then pauses and chews on his bottom lip. Even from the distance you’re sitting at, it’s hella distracting, damn, he needs to NOT do that when he gets all pensive and thoughtful because it sets the two of you on totally different pages with him all sullen and you all trying not to imagine what those teeth feel like carefully edging their way down your

_Nope. Noooope_ that is not a smart thing to be thinking about.

You are so fucking lucky he recaptures his train of thought just then, quick enough to actually snap you out of it.

“Kanaya knows a lot more about the intricacies and complications of quadrants,” he tells you. “Possibly because she’s had hers filled more than I have, in the past.” He rolls his eyes a little. “Big surprise there, considering she’s the one who has an actual fucking place on the hemospectrum, and she’s good-looking on top of it.”

You could interject with an argument there, but it might make things a little weird so you decide not to.

“Once we started discussing your… thing with Terezi, it hit me that I inadvertently pushed the BOTH of us into a quadrant that I hadn’t been expecting. Not in a million fucking sweeps.”

You furrow your brow. “Uh, what?”

“I.” He scratches at the back of his neck. “I auspisticized. Accidentally. Between you and Gamzee.” He sounds embarrassed and a little stressed out, but you can’t tell if it’s warranted or not because you know fuckall about this kind of thing, the clueless one certainly is you. You don’t even have to settle into flat, confused silence before he’s giving you an explanation; he catches on quickly, smart kid. “An auspistice is… it’s basically a mediator, between two parties of a conflicting relationship. Would-be enemies, I guess you could call them. The auspistice is essentially there to make sure that neither of the two rip the other’s fucking head off.”

“Like a referee?” you throw in, because you may as well toss in terminology that you can actually understand. You’re trying, here. You might be kind of a jerk sometimes but right down to the core of the matter, you really do care about this little fucker and seeing him with his guard down for such an extended period of time is really starting to mess with your head.

“I don’t know what that is but sure, whatever makes you happy.”

“So, let me… sort this out. We got into a physical fight, me and him, and you intervened and settled shit down… so that means that we’re in a big Mormon sisterwife clusterfuck now, or… what?”

“What is a Mormon?”

“Okay, forget that part. You get what I’m asking, so spill.”

He stares you down for a second, visibly unsure of how to take your tone. It’s true, that last bit came out a little stronger than you meant, but that’s only really because you just got a gigantic relationship bomb dropped on you and you sort of feel like you’re stuck in something totally non-consensual, now, and it’s freaking you out a little bit.

“To us, an auspisticism is a relationship. The one auspisticizing has the most commitment, but all three parties are pretty fucking involved with each other."

Your stomach drops a little.

"Wait, no, _hell_ no--"

"Uh, _yeah_ , actually. Sorry to piss on your parade. It's not a red romance, but it's still a romance."

"Uh-uh, no fucking way, _fuck_ to the _no_ , no way did I just fucking initiate some restrained, chained-pitbull kind of love affair with the clown, _nope_."

You can tell, even through your now VERY elevated discomfort, that Karkat is looking and sounding almost like he's trying really hard not to be lapse back into panic - not that you can actually blame him, now – and it’s not really working. 

"Yeah, you sure did that, Dave. You sure did go into those vents looking for a fucking fight and come out of it with a pair of new ashen boyfriends, fucking _congratulations_ and bravo on a job well done. I hope you're happy, hope that was what you were totally aiming for because you got it, it's yours, and now I get to fucking figure out how the FUCK I'm supposed to handle two quadrants involving that sanity-ridden, messily painted fucking murderous excuse for a best friend." 

He barks out a sharp laugh. You don’t like where this is heading.

"Or maybe I don't, Dave, because you intervened and probably destroyed my moirallegiance altogether, so THANK YOU SO MUCH for giving me the opportunity to _completely_ defecate all over the ONE relationship that actually meant something to me in my fucking pathetic, barren desert wasteland of quadrant history and instead, swap it out for one that I _really don't WANT_ right now and one that is WAY too much fucking effort than I was prepared for."

He pauses in his unforeseen downward spiral only briefly to take a breath, and in that one breath the reality of what he's been dealing with, what you've been so carelessly waving aside because of your own ignorance, comes crashing down on you so hard that the air actually fucking hitches in your lungs.

He doesn't notice.

"So good for us, _yippee_ , Dave, we both have TWO fucking slots filled _totally_ against our own will because we're stupid fucking _fucknuggets_ who can't rub enough brain cells together to make a spark big enough to acknowledge something as natural as _common fucking sense_ while dealing with our emotions and the emotions of other people. We are _inconsiderate_ and we are _stupid_ and we are getting what’s fucking coming to us." 

You know he doesn't mean 'we', there. He means 'you'. That makes the weird tightness in your chest even worse. 

You need to stop him.

The only thing you can think to do is lean forward, reach out to catch one of his wildly gesturing hands, and yank him right onto the couch with you.

It's clumsy - he scrambles a little because he's being forced off-balance and pulled into a direction he wasn't prepared for, and in the process of trying to find purchase somewhere, one of his knees accidentally knocks against your ankle and it sucks, it hurts, but it's fine, because what you just did momentarily fulfills the very purpose you did it for. He's totally speechless now. He's all wound up and stiff as you drag him right up against you - you, against the armrest and him in the most awkward fucking position imaginable, his head being aggressively snuggled against your chest, practically on his hands and knees over you, his ass comically stuck up in the air like he has no clue where else to put it.

Feels nice, actually. For the incredibly short amount of time that he allows it without fuss, that is. Karkat has this little calm before the storm period when something happens to him that totally fucking floors him. It doesn't last long at all, because he usually unfreezes within a few seconds and starts throwing fists and screamy insults.

You're kind of prepared for it, which makes it a lot easier. The moment his instincts kick in and he pulls himself away from you, you let him go because you aren't about to hold him there against his will. It DOES kind of suck that he shoves his hand against your face and uses it as leverage to push himself into more of a sitting position, fucking up your shades again so that one side of them is so high up on your face that the eye behind it is totally exposed.

"What the FUCK, DAVE," he yells as he rocks back onto his haunches, expression pinched completely into that unfiltered, uncensored rage you'd had gotten so used to on him. "What the hell is _wrong with you_?"

"A lot," you offer in response, but it comes out funny and blubbery because he's still firmly squishing the side of your face.

He wrenches his hand back like your words just burnt the shit out of it. He even cradles it against his chest like a goddamn diva. "Do you understand how _gravely_ you’ve probably fucked me over? What is stopping my words from correctly and successfully getting through to you? Why aren't you fucking _listening to me_?"

"Karkat, man," you say levelly, calmly, pulling your shades back down. You hope he doesn't see that your carefully even expression is the biggest front you've had to muster up to date. Inside, the guilt is pretty fucking awful. "Just… shh, for a second--"

"FUCK YOU, I'm not going to _SHH_ because you asked me to, you self-centered prick." He reaches out again, grabs hold of your shoulders, and actually shakes you. Pretty hard, too; he manages to shock you with it. "I _hate_ you, I hate you more than I have ever fucking hated anything in my life, I hate you with every fucking mutant blood cell sludging its way through my worthless fucking veins and I hate your IGNORANCE and I hate that everything I have tried to hold onto for SO LONG was probably just destroyed because _you_ wanted to have a little bit of fun, so Dave, FUCK you, FUCK you and your lack of fucking decency, and FUCK you for _making_ me hate you like this."

"I know," you choke out, cutting in before he can keep going. You lift your hands (goddamn when did they start shaking, why are they shaking, there's no need for that, guys, cut it out) and actually manage to come into gentle, passive contact with either side of Karkat's fuming face. "I know, buddy, I fucked up pretty good."

"You fucked up _royally_ ," he seethes back at you. You were expecting him to completely reject contact with you again, but he must be wearing himself out, finally getting all of this into the open. How long has he wanted to say all of this shit to you? Must've been building for awhile.

You duck your head a little so you can look up at him over the rim of your shades instead of through them. You rarely ever make actual eye contact with people anymore, so it's become this weird thing that whenever you pointedly initiate eye contact, it means that shit is serious.

"I'm sorry," you offer him, and swallow back your discomfort. Apologizing has always felt like trying to throw up dry sand. Probably links back to the way you were raised. You couldn't say for sure.

NOW is when the little d-bag decides to jerk his face out of your grasp, baring his teeth at you. “You’re… _sorry_ , Dave? _Sorry_? Wow, great, that’s just fantastic, I’m sure glad for THAT, I was worried that you did all of that bullshit completely remorselessly!”

God he is just this tiny angerball, you are stuck between wanting to throw him on the floor for being so goddamn stubborn and not accepting that you’re trying, it’s really not easy for you to admit that you just did like five fucking things REALLY wrong in rapid succession, and wanting to wrap your arms around that thin little waist and drag him back in, just to feel the tension in his body up against yours despite everything with Terezi because fuck you for being a hormonal teenager with the hots for more than one person.

You don’t go with either option. Instead, you settle for the safer route and reach up to catch his face between your hands again, but this time your hold is a lot firmer and more forceful. “Dude, _stop_ , shut up for a second and let me talk.”

He begrudgingly acquiesces and shuts his mouth. He breathes steadily but loudly through his nose at you.

Fuck, now that you actually got him where you need/want him, your mind is drawing a total blank. You maybe should start rehearsing this kind of shit in your free time so you’re a little better prepared for situations like this one when they finally come up.

_Just go with it, man, roll with it and drop that fucking sonnet on him._

Yeah, that sounds fine.

“I didn’t get it, okay? That kind of thing isn’t what humans have to keep in mind, you know, we’re pretty fuckin’ linear for the most part. Sometimes we DO have our own equivalent to quadrants, some people are chill with dating two or three other people, but that’s just individuals, like you can’t just generalize something like that over our entire species. Everyone is pretty different in that respect. _I’ve_ never had to worry about keeping tabs on a ton of dates or anything, so that’s where _I’m_ coming from. It’s not a thing that I’m used to, and I wasn’t grasping the idea.”

He deflates a little. He seems to relax and his expression smoothes out the slightest bit. You feel like you’re on the right track. Your hold on his face loosens a little, relaxes, and by pure instinct your thumbs brush over his cheekbones and _wow, oops_ , that was kind of a weirdly intimate gesture, you really hope he didn’t notice that enough to give a shit.

You keep going, if not just to cover your ass.

“I get it now, though. I fucked up. That was a thing that happened, I did that, and I _admit_ to doing that, you know? I ain’t proud of it, either, I don’t actually LIKE screwing people and their relationships over, man. I didn’t go into any of that clown bullshit because I knew that it would fuck your system with him up. I didn’t even think it would reach you, I wanted it to be between us.”

He takes a breath. “I still don’t see why you even had to do it in the first place, and why you couldn’t leave him well enough alone.” His voice is a LOT quieter now, almost a little raspier than usual, but he’s not exactly cooing at you. You know he’s still pissed. He’s just a good amount less pissed than before.

“Because I’m retarded, man, Idunno, I got nothin’ for you there.”

His eyes narrow at you a little, unbelieving.

“Seriously, I wanted to hash things out with him and get to the bottom of shit, it _literally_ had nothing to do with you from the start.”

One of his eyebrows lifts up, only a little. Goddamn, you _like_ his face, it really fucking sucks.

“You wanted to play hero,” he says.

Makes you sound pretty lame when he says it that way. Maybe you _are_ pretty lame, letting an alien dressed like a juggalo rapper (ho boy, that sure is a sentence) beat your ass into the ground like that.

“…I guess I did,” you reply lamely, the lamest lamer to ever lame, jesus, wow.

Karkat scoffs out a soft huff of humourless laughter. “Moron.”

“I know.” You keep saying that. ‘I know’. It’s like you never knew how to admit to doing something _really fucking wrong_ before and you’ve JUST learned, so you’re gonna overdo the shit out of it because it’s so new and exciting. “Not my best moment.”

“You seem to have a lot of not-best moments lately.”

“Hey now.”

“I’m being fucking serious, nookweed.”

“Sorry, yeah, I hear you.” You move your hands from his face to his shoulders. “So… how do I like… break up with the clown.”

You almost didn’t ask that question because you were sure that it’d detonate him in some way. You haven’t exactly been sensitive to his _quads_ and now that you feel like you’re making SOME sort of connection with him you just went and let that little quip go.

You won’t deny that your hands tighten a little on him, just in case.

But, to your surprise, he heaves an incredibly heavy sigh and looks away from you, off to the side somewhere. “I’m not sure. I don’t even know what he thinks about the whole thing.”

“Think we might get out of this free and clear?”

“Who the hell knows, maybe.” It doesn’t feel like that edge in his voice is aimed at you anymore, thankfully. You don’t need your head ripped off any more than it already has been today. “We’re _in_ it, there’s no way to get around that. But I can’t ever fucking make my mind up about my quadrants, anyway, and I don’t think Gamzee is too dead-set on being linked to you in any way except maybe crushing your delicate human bones down to dust.”

“About that,” you cut in. His eyes slide back to you. “I’m pretty sure he actually was trying to straight-up kill me. I’m not sweating dying just because he’s a psychopath, that’s not how God Tier works, but it’d be real fucking inconvenient if he just kept fucking trying, know what I mean?”

“He probably would,” Karkat tells you casually. Oh, _goodie_. “I’ll try to shoosh him down as much as I can, but after the way he responded to me I have no fucking clue how he’ll take it.”

“Yeah, uh, can I maybe like. Idunno. Shack up in here for a few nights?”

He blinks at you, before withdrawing, sitting back on his haunches again and effectively pulling himself out of your grasp. His face  gets all serious and frowny and worried. “And sleep where, exactly.”

“Man, I’m totally fine right here,” you say and drop your hands to his knees, since they’re closer to you and you really don’t want to stop touching him. He IS still kind of sitting on you and the last time you two were on this couch special and happy and weird (let’s not forget the squirmy dick, you _still_ and probably _always will_ consider that very fucking weird) things were happening. You feel like it’s natural to want to touch him a little. Platonically. Knees are a pretty platonic and non-sexy part of the body, right?

Either he doesn’t really notice or doesn’t care, ‘cause he isn’t batting your hands away.

He considers you for a second before shrugging one of his shoulders. “I guess. It’d be safer for you, at least.”

You grin and waggle your eyebrows at him, beyond relieved that things seem to have simmered down enough to feel actually moderately comfortable again. You feel like you just learned something vital about handling his mood swings, like you just took some crazy-strict Karkat Vantas entrance exam and you didn’t ace it but _damn_ you gave it your all and you passed, go you, soldier. “What, you’re worried now? I thought you said you hated me.”

He glowers _instantly_. “I do hate you.”

“Naw, you don’t. If you hated me you wouldn’t _care_ if I got ripped to shreds by your crazy bestie, man, don’t lie.”

“No, I hate you, and I hate your glasses.”

No heat whatsoever in his voice.

Strider, you are a champion.

"If you hate 'em so much," you drawl. "take 'em off."

He reacts strangely to that. His jaw visibly clenches and the worry lines return to what you see of his forehead through his mop of hair. _You_ certainly don't have a problem with the prospect; if you did, you wouldn't have suggested it. This wouldn't the first time he's seen you sans shades, so you're not as inclined to be hesitant about removing them. He knows what your eyes look like and you're trying to make a point, here. If ANYTHING it's because you're trying to make a point.

It's like you're trying to one-up each other again, falling right back into the old routine, thank christ. His face hardens suddenly with determination and he leans forward, reaches down with one hand to slide the shades off of your face. He moves to place them on the floor somewhere while you blink back the initial sensitivity of the room's lighting. Your eyes adjust quickly and he's back in your sights, still bent in closer to you, staring down at you like he REALLY isn't sure what to do with you now.

Like he unwrapped a Christmas present that he can't decide if he actually likes or not. 

Kinda stings a little when you put it like that, you can't lie.

You attempt to break the tension. "See? Now you don't have to hate my glasses."

The corners of his eyes tighten a little. "I still hate your stupid, ugly face."

You actually laugh at that one; whether it's from relief or you're genuinely amused, who cares. It feels good, whatever it is. It loosens something in your chest that you didn't realize was there in the first place.

"Aw, you don't hate me," you repeat and suddenly your hands are off of his knees, on his shoulders again, giving them a firm squeeze - something meant ONLY for friendly comfort, at first, but then he does this thing. 

He does this thing that affects you way stronger than it should. He fucking… _sighs_ , and his eyes close, and it's like he's trying really hard not to totally melt into you and this is the first time you've like, squeezed any part of him, right?

"Dude, you big on massages or what?" you joke, and he frowns deeper, goes to open his mouth to say something snarky back, but you give his shoulders another, much tighter squeeze and he's suddenly a fucking goner, right there in your lap. His arms are just barely bracing him up, but he's slumping down close enough for your chests to almost touch.

Wow.

You're compelled to keep going, just to see what it does. At first you're wondering if he has this really fucking weird kink with massaging or something, but when you slink your hands further around to his back and try to rub at his shoulder blades, your fingers are met with a resilient mass of unhealthily tense muscles back there and you instantly feel sorry for him.

No wonder he's reacting like that. 

"Holy shit you're stiff," you comment stupidly.

He grunts. "Shut up, that feels good and you're ruining it."

You huff out another laugh. You're not sure what else to do, honestly. Your 'relationship', whatever you classify it as, with Karkat is volatile and totally unpredictable, it seems; a pendulum swinging between friend and the more lighthearted side of adversary. The past few minutes, for example, have been an actual roller coaster of different moods and emotions from his end, and you're surprised at how well you're keeping up with him and adapting. You can _totes_ handle this guy. 

But suddenly, your kneading at his too-taut muscles swerves from the this-feels-good lane into this-feels-WAY-TOO-FUCKING-GOOD and your first indication is that he rocks forward a little, totally without warning, and his thigh just _happens_ to still be at the very delicate junction between your legs.

_Shit_.

"Whoa," you murmur, tugging at the back of his sweater a little to snap him out of it. It's like he's entranced, not quite in his right mind, and because you've never seen him like this you're not necessarily certain how to wrangle him back in.

He just barely responds with a distant, "Mmnn?" Yeah, he's done for. This really is all your fault. You're a second away from telling him that maybe he should like, go to bed or something but he lifts his head and before you can say anything, his face is only a few inches away from yours and his lips are parted because he's breathing through them and _oh shit oh fuck_ what do you do, you like Terezi, you honestly do, but this is like dangling turkey in front of a goddamn overfed, over pampered fucking house cat. 

He dips the slightest bit. You can feel the sensitive skin of your lips just fucking _barely_ brushing against his, fuck, why would he do this when he knows that you're kind of seeing someone now, why--

Oh.

_Oh._

Because there are four quadrants and you're only in one.

He's fucking _baiting_ you, the sneaky little bastard, whether he consciously realizes it or not.

"Karkat." It comes out as a whisper, which is the _worst_ fucking idea because you can hear his breath catch and when your gaze flits a little further upward, you find his eyes staring directly into yours, pure fucking beautiful gold, and goddamn you, _goddamn you_ but you've never wanted to kiss someone more in your entire life than you do right now.

But you don't.

Instead, you stay exactly where you are and so does he. Your mouths hover between almost touching and touching a little, but there's not enough friction to really count it as a kiss. Jesus, you're _teasing_ each other, there's really no other way to describe it. You're daring the other to make the move, but neither of you are biting.

Maybe you're both nervous to fall back into bad habits. Maybe you're both insecure fucking ninnies.

Maybe you're just both enjoying this.

You must be zoning out pretty visibly because a handful of seconds later Karkat makes a frustrated, growly noise in the back of his throat and pushes away from you, sliding off of the sofa and self-consciously tugging at the bottom of his sweatshirt. 

"You can stay here," he officially confirms and _wow_ is he fidgeting. "so long as you keep to yourself and don't fucking bother me."

You grin up at him easily (squinting against the lights just above him, _ow_ ) and give him a two-fingered mock salute. "You got it, chief."

"And stay on the couch."

"'Course."

"And don't touch my recuperacoon."

"Jesus dude, I'm not gonna fucking crawl into your space pod and play big spoon little spoon with you in the middle of the night, would you relax?"

His face settles into a scowl. His mouth twitches like he wants to say something back, something witty and sharp and quick, but instead, he mumbles something about getting food and heads to the door.

"Bring the invalid back a cheeseburger," you call out to his retreating form. He flips you off over his shoulder.

You're _really fucking relieved_ that he locks the door behind him.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for party short-chaptering. D:
> 
> * * *

Karkat’s food adventure takes way longer than you think it probably should.

It takes so long that your ankle gets to the point where it feels mostly back to normal and you can stand up on it tenderly, and you look through the titles and covers of pretty much every book in his room. There are a few books strewn around that have to do with technology that is most certainly not of the human variety, but the other 95% look to be romance novels with really goddamn long titles, some of them depicting trolls of all genders and sizes partaking in dramatic, flamboyant, or otherwise compromising positions with each other on the cover. You’re intrigued, but you don’t get a chance to actually crack one open before Karkat finally comes back.

He does have canned goods with him (you have been living off of various canned shit for so long now that you can’t even complain about being sick of it anymore) but his entire demeanor has shifted. He left you flustered, cranky, and seeming mostly back to normal. He’s come back looking tired, frustrated, and _just fucking done_.

He closes and locks the door behind him and dumps his findings on his desk. 

You watch him from behind the shades you’ve slid back onto your face. 

Pretty sure you know what’s going on.

Y’all just had a great feelings jam, so you may as well keep the momentum up.

“You went to see him, huh?”

He pulls out a chair and nods before dropping into it. He sags over the table like his bones suddenly weigh a thousand pounds. You put the book you’d picked up just before he returned back where you found it, cross the room (slowly, as not to wear out the still-healing injury) and stop at the opposite side of the desk.

“I’m gonna go ahead and wager a guess that it wasn’t the most heartfelt welcome you’ve ever gotten.”

He folds his arms in front of him on the tabletop and tucks them in closer, resting his chin on them. His eyes lift to yours and you can see just how much this entire shitshow is wearing him out. “No.”

You wait for him to go on, but he seems content to stop there. You aren’t satisfied with that. Both of your eyebrows lift and you shrug expectantly. 

His forehead furrows at you. “I have no gory fucking details for you, Strider. I brought him some food, he stared at me, I asked if he was alright, he fucking stared at me some more, I carefully brought up the auspiticism, he wants nothing to do with it, and then he stopped talking.” 

“That was it? Seriously?”

It’s his turn to shrug his shoulders. “I don’t know what else you were expecting. We’re off the hook. Doesn’t that make you happy enough?”

You feel your spine straighten a little. “Well, yeah.”

“Good. Then stop bugging me.”

You try to fight against it, but you have to smirk because he’s such a petulant grouchbag. “Dude, go to bed. You look fucking beat and it’d probably do your personality some good, too.”

“Fuck off, Dave.”

“Yeah, way to prove my point.”

He stares at you for a few seconds, and any argument he may have decided to try and come up with on the fly is swallowed up by a well-timed yawn. He tries to stifle most of it with the back of one hand but you can still see the way his lip curves up and over his sharpened canine and the way his tongue curls the slightest bit like it’s trying to pull at the air while he does it _fuck_.

“Fine,” he breathes out on the tail end of it, and scoots his chair back to stand up. “Do whatever, just don’t disturb me if I fall asleep, I barely have enough sopor left to effectively work and I’d like to take advantage of what I do have while I can.”

“No pervy cuddles with your totally unconscious body in the slimy shit, got it.”

He grunts at you disapprovingly and shuffles to his recuperacoon… then hesitates, and slowly looks back at you.

“Can you not look for a second.”

…oh jesus christ fuck you with a running buzzsaw he sleeps in that shit totally nude doesn’t he.

You maybe spin a little too quickly on your heel than you’re comfortable with admitting because you are _not_ in the right frame of mind to see Karkat in any variance of nakedness right now. You honestly do not think that your brain could handle it, especially not after your earlier encounter with him on the couch. 

You awkwardly face said couch and no, that’s not helping, because you’re staring at the cushions he once had you pushed down against while simultaneously listening to the shuffling of clothing being slowly removed, article by article, and what else is a teenage boy’s brain going to do but try and draw up a fucking very painfully vivid mental image to match the sounds. 

You hate your life. You hate your life so much.

After a few seconds of just flat-out wishing you actually COULD die but only for now and not forever, you hear some really unappealing squishy noises that actually make you feel a lot better about everything, that sounds fucking nasty, no way could you possibly maintain a boner while listening to that.

Then, nothing.

Literally, nothing. 

"Uh," you try to give him a signal boost. "You cool now?"

“Mn?” he hums back, and he already sounds half asleep. “Oh. Yeah.”

You slowly turn your head first, eyes tentatively sliding to look back at him over your shoulder. All you see is a small patch of wild, black hair and the tip of one stubby little horn nestled snugly into the recuperacoon. Stuff must work fast. And he must really need the sleep.

Unfortunately, you’re wide awake. You do have the option of leaving but truth be told, you feel a lot more comfortable with the idea of sticking around for the night to let the dust settle a little. You have a feeling that if you were on your own and out in the open right now, the fucking juggalo probably wouldn’t play around with you this time.

So your options are chance leaving and probably wind up in at least fifteen or sixteen different pieces, read ALL of Karkat’s romance books in rapid succession, or…

You turn your sights on his desk.

…hm.

 

-  -  -

 

Bro told you once that you had a lot of potential with gadgets. Even as a kid, you liked to fiddle around with things and understand the basics of how they worked, on the outside AND the inside. He taught you how to open simple things like remote controls and desktop computer mice so you could take a look at their guts. Obviously you had no fucking idea WHAT you were looking at, but it mapped out the basics for you and that was fine enough. You learned over time. You learned the differences between a breadboard and a PCB. You learned how to utilize a perfboard because shit, those suckers can be used for just about fucking anything. While you obviously can’t do the more intricate stuff, like building each individual copper coil and placing it exactly where it needs to be, you know enough to _get_ technology to a decent degree. You don’t want a career in it or anything. Spending countless hours hunched over a microscope doesn’t sound like your style, anyway.

You’re willing to spend a pretty ridiculous amount of time hunched over Karkat’s desk, though, because the dude’s been through a lot of really stressful relationship bullshit lately and he deserves a damn break. You also sort of feel like you owe him one at this point; you can deny it all you want but you really were the one that got the ball rolling with the clown. You were the catalyst.

The LEAST you can do for the grumpy little shit is finish what you started on his arts and crafts project.

You can’t do too much for him because you still only have an infuriatingly vague idea as to what he’s actually trying to accomplish. You get both of the units totally open and exposed, though, nice and neat and pretty. You repair the crack in one of them the best you can – there’s no guarantee that it’ll work as well as it did when it was a relevant piece of equipment (or that it’ll even work at all, but hey, rose-tinted cooldude shades), but you’re giving it a shot because it was something for him to focus on before it fell by the wayside to make room for his recent drama miniseries. If he had something to gently nudge him back into working on it, it could be a pretty good distraction for him. And maybe he wouldn’t be such a quick-triggered ass all the time.

When that noise is done with, you stand up, stretch, and head back to the couch. On the way there, you swipe a book about alien technology from one of the many book piles on Karkat's floor. Once you're reclined and comfortable on your makeshift bed for the night, you flip the book open and start reading.

Or start trying to.

It's incredibly hard to follow. Almost impossible. There are fortunately English translations of everything, but the language it's primarily written in is what you can only assume to be the native language of the trolls. It looks more like symbols than written words, pretty much everything you'd expect an alien language to look like. Schmutz. Gobbledygook. 

As mentioned, though, you're trying. You gotta do it in a quiet way, too, unless you want him catching on that underneath your even, douchey-douche exterior, you really are just a big stupid mess of sugary marshmallows for the guy and you want to remove anything in his life that stresses him out. You just don't want to do it in a way that's too obvious or noticeable because what if it freaks him out and scares him off, then where would you be?

It should be a weird prospect for you to realize that the same dude you used to care very little for on a personal level is the dude who takes up a majority of your time and thoughts these days.

You've been staring at the same foreign symbol for the past minute and a half.

You're in a lot of trouble, man.

 

\- - -

 

You're roused awake by a loud thump and a sharp hiss. 

Everything slams immediately back into full awareness and you jerk into a half-sitting position, but one look across the room tells you that it's just Karkat climbing out of his damn pod. He's being tender with one foot as he places it on the floor. Probably stubbed his toe or something.

You settle back down and pretend to close your eyes, but keep them cracked a little. This can't be the first time he's gotten up; most of the lights have been turned off and the book you'd fallen asleep trying to read through is nowhere to be seen in your general vicinity. Even though the room has been dimmed considerably, you can still make out the basic shape of him, his strong but compact stature and the incredibly soft, barely-there light from whatever source across the backs of his bare shoulders and the sheen of slime still lingering there and _oh, wait, shit, he's, yup, he's still naked, naked and slicked up, oh no, jesus_.

Now you _definitely_ aren't inclined to close your eyes all the way.

He stays in one position for a moment, his body turned JUST enough to keep his slithery goods out of your very limited line of sight, before you see the flash of reflective eyes, like a cat's, shift in your direction. You stay incredibly still, keep your breathing steady and slow, until those eyes look away and he turns, pulls his pants on, and slips quietly out of the room.

Huh. Guess even aliens need to piss in the middle of the night sometimes.

You smile for absolutely no reason and nestle further into the blanket draped over you that wasn't there when you first fell asleep.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another relevant _shawty_. this is the second to last chapter we're almost through part two aaahhhh thank you guys SO MUCH for sticking with me and liking my writing and leaving awesome comments. as always, plugplugplug, feel free to come say hi on Tumblr ( **bbbbangarang** ) if you have one!
> 
> * * *

“Dave. Dave, get up.”

You process the voice as your mind is slowly dragged, too groggy to even kick and scream, back into consciousness.

“Hey, I need to talk to you.”

Yeah, _now_ he wants to be a Chatty Cathy when you’re finally getting some fucking shut-eye, the prick. You barely crack your eyes open but your brain keeps trying to pull you forcibly back into sleep.

“Seriously? Fucking wake up, it’s not that hard.”

The bite in that voice is enough to kickstart you into actually waking up. You blindly reach over the side of the couch for your shades and slip them on before pulling yourself up into more of a sitting position. You push your blanket off to the other end of the cushions, watching Karkat with sleep-blurred vision as he retreats from you, satisfied that you’re awake. 

When he reaches his desk, he turns to look at you, gesturing toward the little gift you left him the night before. “You actually finished this?”

“Yep,” you reply, voice strained through a long stretch. “After you went to sleep. What I could of it, anyway.”

He shoves his hands into his pockets – not something you see him do too often, actually – and looks back at it. Looks back at you. Rocks on his heels a little bit. Aw. Abashed Karkat, that’s pretty new. His chin nudges in the direction of his book piles. The alien book you’d been poking through before you fell asleep is on the top of one. “And you were reading that?”

“I gave it my damndest, dude, but it’s not really English-friendly.” You swing your legs over the side of the couch and slowly stand up. Your ankle is totally back to normal. “That other stuff is your like, native tongue, right?”

“Alternian,” he corrects you in a clipped tone. “Yes.”

You move to the desk, leaning one hand down against it and hoping you look more ‘cool’ and less ‘toolbag’. “Pretty extensive stuff. Like I said, I tried, but it might actually be a hell of a lot easier if you helped me out with it a little.”

He eyes you skeptically and thankfully you aren’t offended by his noticeable lack of instantaneous cartwheeling enthusiasm over your request for his assistance. You haven’t brought this project up in awhile and for all you know he probably figures that you’d want to spend more time with Terezi (you sort of do, but you were the one who signed up with this in the first place) but at this point you’re actually pretty determined for at least SOMETHING to go right in his admittedly pretty fucking miserable life.

"…are you going to take it seriously?" he finally asks, and you could swear that he looks kind of guarded.

You clutch at your chest with one hand dramatically, flinging the other against your forehead. "Me? Not take anything _seriously_?"

His shoulders hunch and his jaw clenches. "Fuck you, that was a valid question."

"Which I gave a totally invalid answer for. Man, of course I'm going to take it seriously, what the fuck. I finished cracking those things open and fixed the broken one for you, didn't I?"

"Bravo, asshole, do you want a reward or something?" You grin. Really wide. He scoffs. "Ugh, nevermind. So what are you attempting to accomplish by brushing up on Alternian tech, exactly?"

You shrug a shoulder. "If anything, a better understanding of it. You wanna mix and match and make worlds collide, I'm gonna have to figure out how the fuck the other world actually works, to some extent." You pull the two closest chairs to you out, sit down in one, and pat the back of the other. "Sit. We're gonna hash this out, bro, we're gonna get this ball rolling like a Katamari on crack."

"A what?" he asks as he sits, _tiredly_ because he's ALWAYS prompting you to elaborate on shit.

You wave that one away because it's not important - except your mind cups a hand around its mouth and whispers _Karkatamari_ conspiratorially and gleefully to you, it takes everything in you not to react outwardly to it - and lean back in your seat a little. "So you wanna make communication devices, right?"

"Yes."

"And you wanna use the walkie talkies for sound."

"That was the idea."

"Kay. Do you want it to do anything else?"

He thinks for a second. You feel like he's having a really hard time admitting that he still wants to cooperate with you, even though it's pretty obvious that he does.

"My thought was to have sound and projection," he replies slowly, and he's actually holding himself back from being excited about his big ideas, you can tell, and it's _fucking adorable_ , he needs to _not_. "Like video-chatting on the husktop, but completely mobile and designed to be worn somewhere on the body that's easily accessible."

"…like the wrist? Like a watch?"

He nods. "Exactly where I planned it, actually."

You can dig this. 

"Why did you plan this whole thing out, anyway?"

He comes as close to looking you dead in the eyes as he can through the lenses of your shades. His expression is actually pretty unreadable. "Who knows what's going to happen when we're finally off this meteor?"

He's got a good point, and it's a thought that you've been admittedly ignoring the holy hell out of since you embarked. 

"What if we land somewhere dangerous?" he goes on. "Some of us could get separated. We could get lost. I wanted to take precautions since we don’t know what the hell we’re flying into right now."

"What if people do get separated and two people in the same group have both of the thingies?”

"You have the advantage of time and flight on your side, don't you?"

You can't help but to smirk. How fucking presumptuous. "Already labeled me the search party emissary without even asking me first, huh?"

He withdraws a little, frowning. Oh no, no no, that's the opposite of what you want. No, baby boy, little sensitive nugget, you can have your dream, nobody is dashing it, _shhhhh_. 

"It was a joke, man," you're quick to correct yourself. "You nailed it, if anyone would be suited for the job, it'd be me or Rose. On account of the flying."

"I was going to keep one of them and give the other to you."

You don't come up with a response right away. You stare dumbly at each other. You're wondering if it's a trick of the wonky lighting of the room that seems to darken his cheekbones a little.

"Yeah, man," you reply. "Sure. I'll take one."

The tension in his shoulder releases a little, but yeah, his cheeks definitely have that little tinge of red under the gray, it's totally unmistakable. You’ve seen that touch of colour there before, but it wasn’t a result of embarrassment that time. Heh. "Like I said, you have the most advantages. You're helping me build them, it only makes sense."

"Right." You're grinning and you truthfully don't mean to. You're grinning like _such_ a fucking idiot, way to go, Strider, nice subtlety there, did you get it at Kmart on clearance like ten years ago because that shit just _ain't_ working the way it's supposed to anymore, Ol' Bessie has gone out to pasture and needs to be put down.

He tries to glare at you. _Tries_. "Anyway," he says pointedly, to reel you both back in, bless his precious heart. "What I'm stuck on is how to get real-time video involved.” 

You lean your elbow on the tabletop, tapping your chin with your fingers. “So what we’re really looking for right now is something to take code and make it translatable?”

“I… guess so, yeah.”

You both lapse into thoughtful silence for a few minutes. You think that you vaguely remember seeing something once on one of your initial explorations – some kind of crazy, sci-fi inspired master control room filled entirely with old computers, the ones that took up entire walls of space. You can’t recall from the top of your head but if that room has any kind of teletype machine – which you’re thinking it does, because none of those computers had actual monitors – you might just be onto something.

“I got an idea.” You slap the table with an open palm (startling him, oops) and stand back up. “We’re going on a field trip.”

 

-  -  -

 

You _could_ use the transportalizer since the old computer graveyard is a pretty decent distance from Karkat’s room, but neither of you are apparently inclined to head in that direction. When you hit the hall and take the opposite direction, he follows you.

You’ve recently admitted to yourself that you’re in trouble. You know you are. You’re in things just a _little_ too deep with Karkat now, something you’d been hoping to avoid by breaking off the fooling around, but life is stupid and funny and the more you try to keep away from him on a physical level, the more tempted you are to just throw everything else to the wind and seal the fucking deal already. You know for a fact that the interest is still there on his part, he’s all but admitted it to you by draping himself all over you the night before, so really, _you’re_ the one being the dickhead and floating around the topic without fully discussing it with him.

He probably thinks you’ve become bored with the idea of him and moved on for the most part. You wish you knew how to express the unbelievable _untruth_ in that without compromising your budding relationship with Terezi.

You spend most of the walk to your destination in silence, save for your mismatched footsteps down the vacant hallways. You find yourself eyeing the ventilation grates on the walls every so often and feeling really uncomfortable with the mental image of him in there, watching, following from grate to grate to grate to keep an eye on you. You felt a lot more secure with the guy when he and Karkat were still cuddle puddlers, but now it’s like… what the fuck is keeping him from coming out of nowhere and offing you as quickly and brutally as possible?

That’d really put a damper on any future plans you may have already made.

Also, Karkat shouldn’t have to watch _another_ one of his buddies croak at the hands of his best friend. …ex-best friend? You have no idea. Their relationship checkerboard is still a pretty fresh and intimidating concept, let alone how severe things might get once one of those quadrants break up. Cuddle puddle over. All or nothing, no holds barred. Shit, he could even be down for attacking Karkat if their bestie-connection is gone.

You keep your strife specibus at the ready and slow your steps enough to at least half a foot behind his. Luckily, he doesn’t notice.

 

-  -  -

 

You’re not surprised to learn that Karkat has seen this room before, and even less surprised to know that he tried to pillage the everloving shit out of it before he finally admitted to himself that these giant machines just wouldn’t look good with his dingy little room’s feng shui. 

Also, captchaloguing them would be a _bitch_.

The room would be a hell of a lot bigger if these things weren’t taking up so much space. You can’t put your finger on what, exactly, they must have been used for before neglect and time took their tolls on them, but a computer or machine without a monitor or display of any sort is exactly what you need in this particular situation, and that’s just what these happen to be.

You can’t give Karkat any promises, but you can at least promise that you’ll _try_ to figure it out. He seems placated enough by that alone, anyway.

You can acknowledge that this might possibly be a long shot, but you’re coming to realize that you’re so _into_ this because you’re sure that it would have been something Bro’d be interested in, too. You feel compelled to carry on his legacy, so to speak, even when it comes to you fucking around with shit you don’t fully grasp yet. You don’t want to be stuck on him the way you are lately, but all of this technological and strifing shit that have been going down these days just keep fucking reminding you of him. You were rushed pretty forcibly through your mourning period; you didn’t really have a choice at the time. A lot of shit was going down. The others saw the abridged version because you kept to yourself about it for the most part, and you’ve always kind of hated the idea of being _that_ vulnerable around people, even your closest friends.

You’re fucked up and you’re stubborn, and they know that. They weren’t expecting anything more from you.

Of course, it doesn’t take long for Karkat to start getting nosy about what you plan to do, but you can’t fault him for it because this IS his project and he DOES have every right to know all of the steps, one by one. “How are these machines playing into communication, exactly?” he prattles on, as you’re struggling to move one of the fucking things away from the wall it’s up against by yourself. “Can you even get them working again? They look pretty outdated.”

“We’re not trying to get them to work, exactly,” you grunt back, releasing the machine and moving around to the back of it, where you’ve just created a nice little Dave-sized wedge between it and the wall to fit into. “We’re only trying to get a _part_ of them to work.” You flick through your sylladex and draw out the screwdriver that you stuck up in there. “You happen to by some fucking miracle of a chance know what Baudot code is?”

He’s silent. You peek back around the edge of the computer at him. He shrugs at you with an expression that says ‘Really though?’

You get back to unscrewing the back panel of the machine. “It’s kinda like morse code, closest thing I can compare it to. It’s basically a way for one teletyping system to communicate with another using 5-bit codes. Like turning the code into actual characters and letters and junk.”

You finish with the top row of screws and squat down lower to start on the bottom ones. He shuffles closer, crouches down beside you and holds his hands out, cupping them together. You take the hint and drop all of the screws into them. 

“So, in the most basic terms, this bah-doe makes words digitally?”

“Maybe not _digitally_ , exactly, but yeah, something like that. You have forums on your websites and stuff for trolls, right?”

He snorts derisively. “Think about what species you’re talking about right now.”

You chuckle and move on to the last screw. “Right, what am I thinking? You guys are so fucking argumentative that it’d be impossible for you to NOT have forums as an outlet. Anyway. You ever come across annoying shits writing stuff out in zeroes and ones trying to be cute but really it’s just fucking irritating?”

“Yes,” he deadpans. "I've never had to contest it personally but I have seen that before."

“That’s Baudot, right there. The zeroes and ones are a sequence, and every sequence of five numbers stands for a letter or number or figure. It’s really basic shit, like there are limitations, I think there are only fifty-five characters in total that it can translate.”

You can _hear_ him raise an eyebrow at you; you’re getting really unsettlingly good at reading him without even looking at him. “How the hell are limitations going to do us jack shit at all with imagery?”

“See, that’s where your tech comes in.” You drop the last screw into his hands and rise (he follows suit) to gently ease the back of the machine off. “What I’m thinkin’ here is we use this method of data communication as a base for transmission, and then your alien stuff can supply the face-time connection.”

You glance over at him and he has this hilarious look of barely-restrained panic on his face. “I would have no idea how to do that.”

“That’s why we’re gonna be study-buddies with your books, bro.”

The panic recedes and is replaced with an even _funnier_ look of realization, god, this _guy_. “…I can’t believe I’m about to say this—“

“Say it, man, rip off the bandaid.”

“—that’s a really smart idea and it might work.”

“Ego, satisfyingly stroked.” You grin and set the machine’s panel against the wall beside you. He moves in to help you take out as much of the _guts_ of the computer as you possibly can without you even prompting him. It’s a tight little space you’re both wedged into and your elbows keep touching and your hands even brush a few times, but neither of you say anything and neither of you do anything to sever the contact whenever it’s made, regardless of how chaste or lingering it happens to be.

And you can’t even lie and say that it doesn’t excite you every fucking time.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY, end of part 2! Thanks for reading, guys! Part 3 is where all the bullshit comes together, but October is a busy month for SFX makeup artists so I won't be able to get anything up for the next couple of weeks.  
> In the meantime, come say hi at >>bbbbangarang on Tumblr!
> 
> * * *

After the struggling you both went through just to get the right bits and pieces out of the computer, you realize once they’re sitting on the desk back in Karkat’s room and waiting for you to do something with them that you have absolutely no clue where to go from here. 

You know that his hopes are high and his expectations are minimal, as they should be, but you’re really kind of unnecessarily disappointed that you can’t just magically Get It right off the bat and fix everything up for him right then and there. Unfortunately, that’s not how knowledge works. You’d be a goddamn genius if it was. Anyone would.

You spend the next couple of weeks studying with him, though, and that part turns out to be surprisingly okay. At first it’s a little awkward – he’s as moody as ever, you learn ( _UN_ surprisingly) that he hates to be interrupted in the middle of a thought, and although you are the one helping _him_ in this situation, he’s actually kind of frustratingly uncooperative. He has this fucking leader complex that he just can’t seem to let go of, even when he’s not in a situation that necessarily needs a leader. You keep trying to explain to him that this isn’t a _mission_ , this is basically a stupidly fucking complicated science experiment and nobody needs to be the one leading any discussions, you’re really more of a team, here, but he has a really hard time wrapping his head around the concept of you taking the hands-on reigns for even a few minutes. 

After you get over that little speed-bump, though, and the two of you seem to figure out how to study or theorize in sync with each other, you feel like you’re starting to connect with him intellectually. You like to give people this impression of yourself like you’re some kind of coolkid douchenozzle who turns everything into a stupid joke and laughs in the face of people who take themselves way too damn seriously, but you know you better than anyone else, and you know that you’re fucking smart. Maybe not as smart as you thought before you took on this endeavor, seeing as you’ve been spending days fucking staring at the computer guts and willing them with your mind to either make themselves work or catch on fire, but you _are_ smart.

Unfortunately, the tech is really kinda way above your level of understanding.  
You’re thinking it has something to do with the Alternian, like a lot of it is lost in translation. You keep getting hiccups in your study time because while the book DOES provide very watered-down English descriptions of a majority of chapters, there are a few very big chunks that aren’t. Karkat is continuously having to supply his own translations for you, and while he started out being fucking grouchy about it, the more you do it the more he seems to warm up to the idea. What began initially as eyerolls and soft, annoyed huffs have been morphing into patient explanations.

It’s really cool, hearing a new language being spoken aloud for the first time. Not even a human language. A fuckin’ _alien_ language. If someone asked you to describe it, you actually don’t think you successfully could. It’s a harsh language, kind of ugly in a way, not entirely appealing on your delicate, primitive little human ears but listening to _him_ speak it must be at least a hundred fucking times better than listening to it coming out of someone like the clown. Karkat’s voice used to grate your nerves. It’s scratchy and a little growly sometimes and definitely not human, and when he screams it’s like _actual, literal_ nails taking their sweet-ass time down a very long chalkboard. 

But it’s grown on you a lot. Especially now that you’re hearing it in his native language.

The guttural, back-of-the-throat blends and rolling R’s are your favourite parts.

Still, that aside, you’re not grasping everything the way you should be.

After a few weeks, you’re both getting _really_ fed up – you over your lack of understanding and him over not being tech-savvy enough to properly connect point A to point B. 

You wind up taking several steps backward and getting into a gigantic argument over it.  
Karkat likes to play the Blame Game when he’s doing something wrong and doesn’t want to admit it because it’ll hurt his pride too much. You’re sort of the same way to a much lesser extent, but it’s _just_ enough similarity to ignite something between your personalities and what starts as a tiny back-and-forth disagreement blows _way_ out of proportion into a full war of yelling (mainly from his end; you can fight while staying totally calm, it’s a gift), insults, and pointing fingers. It’s not even over anything important, either. It’s a small thing that escalates to a big thing because you’re both fucking tired and annoyed and a little stressed out and probably way too invested than you should be. 

It ends with you nope-ing right the fuck out of there before it turns into something immature and slappy, and you don’t go back.

Instead, you take a break from him and his attitude for awhile and spend a little more time with who you technically SHOULD be spending time with. She’s not the jealous or overbearing type, which you enjoy – she’s really chill and doesn’t seem to care that she hasn’t spent time with you for a little while.

This is your first big step in the absolute _wrong_ direction. 

You start spending more time in Can Town than trying to figure out how the hell to make up and start working with Karkat again. He seems to stumble awkwardly through a flurry of different emotional phases – mostly he starts off being verbally passive aggressive when you manage to see one another, then it becomes a silent treatment. That one hits you the hardest because at least passive aggressive is closer to his usual self. If there’s anything that Karkat is not and has never been, it’s _silent_.

You’re not about to act all fucking stupid and confused and like none of this is your goddamn problem because yeah, it most absolutely is your problem. You can at least man up and admit that much.

You just don’t know how to confront him.

So, you don’t. Days turn into weeks. Lots of weeks. Eventually, so many weeks go by that the fucking argument becomes a thing of the past and it’s dropped without either of you verbally confirming it. You’ve always appreciated that despite how different the two of you are in a _lot_ of fucking ways, you always seem to wind up on or near the same page in the long run, and you don’t even have to talk about it. 

Unfortunately you both sort of fall into your own routines, so the prospect of working together on stuff is placed on the backburner. You were so into it before – funny what an extended period of time away from a project can do to a guy’s drive and dedication. You’re okay with it, for the most part. You get to hang out with the Mayor a lot more, which is _awesome_ because you fuckin’ love that guy, and Terezi presents a distraction from something that has been kind of complicating you on an emotional level. You’re thinking you need that right now. 

At one point, you catch Karkat heading sullenly toward the vent room.

Like you said. You fall into your own routines. You don’t have to be _happy_ about it but there it is.

You’re getting comfortable with the way things are going with Terezi, though, so at least there’s that. The idea of her wanting to fill other quadrants and involve you in the exact same shit that Karkat was going to is still lurking around the back of your mind, but this is the here and now and you figure you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it. Or flip it off and hightail back in the other direction. You’ll figure it out, you guess.

As always, when things start heading in a great fucking direction, life has to drop the other shoe and make things even _more_ complicated. Because life is a douchebag. It actually starts to hit you when you’re least expecting it and hanging out with Terezi in the common area. You’d fired up some stupid indie movie that you had saved on your computer (she likes listening to movies; says that it’s her form of ‘watching’ it because the sounds and dialogue and music all help her to paint the scenarios out in her mind. You’d sort of kill to see what crazy shit she comes up) but you didn’t really plan on paying attention to it. Terezi is _crazy_ fucking loud and extroverted and outright about a lot of things, but when it comes to physical affection she’s sort of a pendulum. Sometimes she’s all for it, even though she won’t really let you get past second ( _over_ the clothes, damn) and sometimes you try to make a move on her like any smart, over-expectant fucking asswipe would and she shoves a hand up your goddamn nose to stop you. Her headstrong spontaneity excites you more than it repels you, though, so it’s all good. Also you’re not so sure if you’re keen on the idea of letting her _ridiculous_ mouthful of shark teeth anywhere near your junk anytime soon. Baby steps.

This time, she’s at _least_ leaning more toward the acquiescing side and you wind up with her in your lap on the couch, both of your shades removed and placed to the side, her hands planted firmly on your shoulders. She’s getting a lot better at kissing you without slicing your lips open on aforementioned teeth; she takes her time with it and displays gentility in it that she absolutely does NOT apply to any other aspect of her life. Her weight is light but solid, her hips sharp and angular under your hands, and it is the _perfect_ distraction from thinking about who else could possibly be in this position with you right now, thank fucking god.

You never know what to expect from her, ever, and right now is no exception. Mid-makeouts, she pulls away from you, dragging her long tongue across her lips, and settles herself a little more comfortably over your legs. “We’re not watching your movie, coolkid.” 

“Nope,” you drawl back because you are perfectly fine with that.

“Think we’ll have time to watch movies again after we land?”

‘Land’ being a funny word to use. You've heard it used a few times, actually, and you never quite imagined that your meteor would ‘land’ anywhere. Maybe John and Jade’s ship would, but you always saw the meteor just fucking crashing after it, like the fat, clumsy kid in gym class trying to keep up with his svelte competitor and instead tripping over his own two feet and eating dirt. Then again, who knows, maybe John or Jade can zap all of you the fuck out of there before something like that happens. 

Not a thing you wanna be thinking about with your girlfriend in your lap and an uncomfortable semi in your pants, nope.

“Prob’ly not,” you respond, and hope that the subtle squeeze that you give her hips is enough indication that, uh, hi, middle of necking, meteor to Terezi, come in Terezi. “Doubt we’ll have much time for anything, honestly.”

She hums a little and leans forward, sliding her arms over your shoulders until her elbows are resting on them. This brings her face closer to yours again, so close that your noses are touching, and you glance down toward her lips and hope that she gets the hint.

She doesn’t. What a bad time to be full of little curiosities and wanting to know your thoughts on random shit.

“Think the big fight will start as soon as we get there?” One of her eyebrows quirks up a little and you swear if she had fucking pupils they’d be dilating with excitement right now. “The _biiiig_ fight, I mean.”

You shrug a little. “Hard to say.” Your neck stretches a bit, craning up so you can rub your nose against the side of her neck and try to entice her back into the yes-yes zone. “We got two more years to come up with a game plan, at least.”

She “mmhm”s softly, more a sigh than an actual agreement, and you’re thinking _fuck yes, I win, back to happier things_. But no, then she brings up a different topic, even as one of her elbows moves from your shoulder so her hand can find its place at the back of your head; the touch is encouraging you to keep going, but her mouth _also_ keeps going so it’s a little hard to fully concentrate.

“What if we all get separated?”

Your movements halt, but only for a second because you don’t want her to notice. You hear the same question ghosted over in Karkat’s voice from when the two of you overcame your last big hurdle in his project, and instantly you feel a pang of guilt sock you in the fucking stomach.

You almost tell her about Karkat’s idea. You decide against it at the last minute and press a chaste, distracting kiss to her neck. “Dunno if we should worry about that right now.”

She scoffs teasingly, but doesn’t pull away from you. “Captain Candy Red doesn’t worry about _anything_ , does he?”

“Not even a little,” you lie, kissing her neck again. “You’re a fuckin’ ninja, ‘Rez, if we can trust anyone to lead a search and rescue, you’re the one.”

She cackles a little and _almost_ purrs; you can feel a very brief and very light rumble just under your lips, but it doesn’t become a fully realized sound. She squirms on top of you a bit and, yup, things seem almost back on track. “I’ll keep everyone together somehow,” she says quietly but defiantly. “I’ll be sure of it.”

Your hands slide from her hips around to cradle the small of her back. “Hell yeah,” you murmur, grinning against her skin. “Everyone except the clown, though, fuck that guy.”

This time, she freezes.

Like, _noticeably_ freezes, it’s not even something you can pass off as a fluke.

You pull away from each other at the same time, you looking up at her with a raised eyebrow and her bright red eyes fixating themselves sightlessly on your chest.

“You alright?” you ask, genuinely confused.

Her eyes flick up to yours and she grins. It seems sincere enough, but you’re not totally sure now because what the fuck was that. 

“Yeah,” she agrees belatedly. “Fuck that guy.”

She slides herself off of your lap and faces forward, leaning against your side and closing her eyes, the same way she did when she was actually paying attention to the movie before you started making out.

You loop an arm loosely around her shoulders and wonder what the hell you said to shift the air in the room and fill it with fucking blind-siding (no pun intended, there) tension. She sighs a little, content with your positioning, but you’re not watching the movie anymore.

 

\- - -

 

The last time you have a confrontation with your worst nightmare on the meteor happens about a week later.

You’re trying to give yourself some time to think because you really can’t let your issues bubble up to where they’re manifesting _actual_ stress on you physically. You are too fucking chill to be freaking out about emotional bullshit and not facing your problems is starting to ruin that image for you. You’re the rock here, remember? You’re the cement holding all of these colourful impassioned crazies together. You’re letting all of the shit you’ve been dealing with visibly get to you, and that shit doesn’t fly because far be it from you to make people think they can’t depend on you on an emotional level without you flying off the fucking handle in a fit of _whatever_ you might be feeling.

You gotta ground yourself, and that’s that. You stop taking the transportalizer everywhere and stick to your own two feet when you need to get from one place to the other. The meteor is huge, and all the walking gives you a ton of really helpful time to sort your shit out.

The best way to start the process is to figure out what the fuck you need to do and what steps need to be taken to tie up those touchy-feely loose ends.

Terezi. You like the girl. Species be damned, you’re definitely interested in continuing whatever you have with her because she’s the shit and you don’t feel annoyed or stressed in any way when you’re hanging out with her.

However, she’s still a troll, and there will be a point where you’ll probably have to share her with someone because you might be her special snowflake right now but you can’t take her instincts or her culture away from her. She had quadrants, four of them, and you are only one of those blips on her radar right now. Also, you get the feeling that she might be keeping something back from you, but you’d like to try and chalk that up to your own paranoia and let it sweep right under the rug for the time being.

Karkat. Shit.

…shit. Where do you even start.

You hate to admit it – like, _really_ fucking hate to admit it – but you think you might kind of understand what a troll feels for the black romance or whatever with Karkat. You can see what angle it comes from. The separation used to be a lot more pronounced, like it was pretty literally 50/50. Half the time you wanted to fucking wring his skinny, stupid neck, and the other half, you were physically _holding yourself back_ from pushing him against a wall and keeping him pinned there with your hips.

It started to taper more in the latter half’s favour, before this whole weird-ass fallout happened. There is something so goddamnalluring about his grouchy, surly ass that you still can’t place. By all accounts you should be the _least_ attracted to him because of his attitude, but he plays it in a way that just fucking _works_ for him, he’s just this tiny little ball of pent up anger and frustration and loneliness and low self-esteem and _fuck_ if you don’t want to just drag him into a big goddamn hug sometimes and tell him that it’s the _world_ that sucks, not him.

Safe to say, you’re stuck on the both of them right now.

Pretty solid mess you got yourself lodged into.

The unfortunate thing about you is that when you think like this, real deep and introspective, you kind of fucking forget where you are or what you’re doing. You’ve been walking the whole time, watching only a few inches of corridor floor in front of you, and it’s your lack of attention that catches you in one of the most jump-scare moments of your fucking life.

The lighting on this rock is for shit, always has been, and it makes walking around on your own pretty creepy to begin with. But when you chance a glance upwards and are met with a fucking detached, smeared white face floating in the darkness just beyond what you can see in front of you, you think your heart might _actually_ launch itself up into your throat. The shadows play on it just right, too, hollowing out the eyes and casting an ominous shroud across the cheekbones. You stop immediately, and you stare at it for awhile.

It stares right back at you.

When he finally starts to move, creeping his way out of the darkness toward you, it takes everything in you not to bolt in the other direction because _fuck_ that, this guy mopped the floor with you last time you encountered him and that was embarrassing enough. Even if it means another potential beat down, you’re determined to stand your ground.

His eyes, lazy and half-lidded, stay on yours up until he’s only a foot or two away from you. His weapons are nowhere to be seen – he was real quick about getting them out last time, though, so you don’t trust it. Your sword is still in your specibus but you have it ready to drop, just in case he tries anything. You’re not used to seeing him all out in the open and away from his little hideout anymore, and for some reason that really gets to you. He’s getting braver, you think. Braver or just fed up with being the vent monster. Either way, you don’t feel so great about this new development. 

He slows as he closes in on you, but instead of stopping in front of you, he moves to walk _around_ you, his mouth twisting up into a confusingly satisfied little grin. You follow him with your eyes, your feet planted firmly where they are. 

He lets out this noise just as he passes out of your peripherals, low and gravelly and downright sinister, man, this fucking chilling _awful_ laugh that actually makes you want to punch someone in the face because it freaks you out so much. It paralyzes you for a minute, keeps you from moving because you just _know_ it’s going to be a classic serial killer set-up, like he’s letting you off the hook for SOME unforeseen reason and just when you relax and finally think you’re safe he’s all up and sinking a machete into your skull or something.

That minute passes slowly.

So does the second one.

Finally, you take a breath and dig up enough cojones to turn around, only to face an unsettlingly empty hallway.

You get the nauseating feeling that this fight’s not just about Karkat anymore.


End file.
